Lost Boys
by Le'letha
Summary: Ficlet collection. The bits and scenes that nobody saw, that didn't happen, or that could have been. Increasing amounts of increasingly disturbing slash. Eleventh: It was never about love. Twelfth: For everything there is a consequence, murder most of all
1. March?

_**Lost Boys**_

_**Le'letha**_

**Summary: **Ficlet collection. The bits and scenes that nobody saw, that didn't happen, or that could have been.

**Author's Note: **Le'letha, two of my friends said this January, you HAVE to start reading this series. The very next week, my school library got the first six books. NOW it's eaten my brain (and my wallet), and I have to get the resulting ficlets out of my head lest I explode. Therefore, these are not complete stories. They're fragments. Many of them are from that grey zone between awake and asleep. (Also, there are so many jokes implicit in the title that I'm not even going to go there.)

**Warning: **Ficlet series may contain spoilers, blatant plot changes, or outright denial. Also may contain trace amounts or hints of slash.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Death Note_. If I did, I wouldn't have to be a citizen of Denial Land. As it is, I'm printing passports.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

_I told this one to my best friend on the way to school, purely for the punch line. She laughed and told me that I'd better write it._

**Ficlet One: March?**

It was going to take them all a long, long time to get back on a regular circadian rhythm, Raito thought resignedly. The task force had been pulling all-nighters for a week, sifting through and correlating data. It had taken Matsuda falling asleep on his pile of papers, creating a miniature avalanche, for Ryuzaki to realize that they were all behaving like zombies.

It was really amazing how someone normally so observant could not notice things like that.

Scanning the corridors of the task force's headquarters, Raito couldn't help but worry that even though it was technically mid-morning, everyone was asleep. What if some new information came in?

Well, he supposed that Ryuzaki had rigged some sort of alarm system to alert everyone if that happened. The eccentric young detective could make computers do things Raito had never thought of.

Shaking his head, Raito headed for the main room. He'd check that no red flags had gone up, and then find something to eat.

He'd expected the room to be dark; computers powered down if not off. He was halfway right. All the lights were off. The computers were working at full power, although the screens were dimmed.

No prizes for guessing who was still awake.

"Ryuzaki," he asked sarcastically, "don't you ever sleep?"

For a moment, he thought the little detective hadn't even heard him, but Ryuzaki finally answered, "Close the door."

Asking 'why?' was completely useless, he'd learned. So he didn't ask. It was a small enough request.

"Better," Ryuzaki approved, turning the computer chair slightly to look at his visitor. "I like the dark. No news. And no."

Raito took a second to sort out the answers. It seemed like he'd answered at least one that Raito hadn't even asked, but L did that. Often.

"Rhetorical questions aside," Raito brushed the answer off, "when was the last time you slept—really slept? Catnaps don't count."

Ryuzaki tipped his head on one side, index finger automatically resting on his lips as he mused it over.

"The last time I slept? Hmm." His eyes lost their focus for a second, making him look utterly, deceptively clueless. Finally he came up with, "March?"

For his troubles, he received a deadpan stare. "This must be some new branch of your sense of humor that I don't yet understand."

"No," L denied, keeping the innocent look.

"Ryuzaki, its July."

"So?"

The two gave each other identical uncomprehending stares.

"I think I need breakfast before I ask any more dumb questions," Raito said finally, not believing him in the slightest.

"I think you do," L agreed amiably, knowing Raito didn't believe him.

Well, Raito could just be wrong for once.


	2. Test

**Ficlet Two: Test**

**Author's Note: **Well, I was planning to write my pair of angsty denial-fics, but I had to get this out there. Not even **Kokoro Sabishii**, who I run most of my _Death Note_ randomness past and therefore will show up in these author's notes quite a lot, has heard this one, although the last line is a topic we've discussed and snickered over. Hope she likes it, and that it makes you laugh too.

**Disclaimer:** Denial Land passports, anyone? But I own chocolate chips! …I'm so addicted…

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

_So this popped into my brain this afternoon, as I was 'productively' reading my way through my _Death Note_-slash stories list, and made me laugh, and made sense (sorta)._

As much as he hated the chain, when he actually thought about it, Raito had to admit (very, very, very privately) that he'd gotten used to it. It was a horrible thought, and he avoided thinking it for as long as possible.

But it was true that he rarely noticed it anymore. In fact, he wouldn't have remembered that he was still chained to the scruffy detective if he hadn't made an unwise move away from the table they were sitting at.

L glared at him briefly, one hand the only thing stopping him from sprawling across the table, the other in his mouth, before the flicker of irritation vanished, to be replaced by the same blank look he sported so often.

It went against his nature, but Raito muttered, "Sorry," just to keep the peace, because being chained to L was bad enough without being chained to an annoyed L in the bargain. (If there was actually a Hell…) Taking advantage of the momentary slack, though, he used the extra give to snatch the cold drink out of the fridge that he'd been trying to get in the first place before sitting back down.

The pale youth ignored him, stacking sugar cubes into a construction Raito could swear was geometrically impossible in an effort to illustrate just how much he was ignoring the teen.

Raito bit back a sigh. And they'd been getting along so well for once. Impulsively, he brought it up.

"You know there's a betting pool on how long it takes before we start fighting again?" he asked, fairly sure the answer would be 'yes'. Asking L 'do you know', especially about things that happened inside the task force headquarters, was essentially a rhetorical question.

"Matsuda's prediction expires thirty minutes from now; Soichiro Yagami, in two days; Mogi, by six PM today. Aizawa has reserved judgment, with amusement," Ryuzaki rattled off without even looking up from his construction. At this rate, it was going to be a close call between running out of sugar cubes and the laws of physics realizing they were being mocked. Raito briefly entertained the idea of tugging on the chain again, just to wreck the whatever-it-was, but abandoned it.

"Anyway, we were talking about school. Do you still want to hear boring stories about school?"

For the first time since being pulled off balance, L looked up. "Yes, Raito-kun, I am listening."

Grateful that they wouldn't end up proving Matsuda right (there was quite a bit of money riding on the bet), Raito launched into another string of depressingly normal school stories, trying to avoid shivering at the direct, glassy stare he was receiving from L. He never got used to it.

"Actually," he interjected a few minutes later, "I think you got lucky. Somehow I don't see you as having to take tests."

Contemplatively, L looked up at the ceiling, thumb creeping towards his mouth again. "Before I met Watari, one of my guardians tried to administer an IQ test to me."

Swallowing his surprise at the unexpectedly volunteered information, Raito responded, "Somehow, I'd like to hear _that_ story."

"Hmm," L said thoughtfully. A few seconds went by, and Raito wondered if he'd actually have to ask outright. The man, he'd learned, either _could not_ take a hint, or deliberately pretended that he couldn't in order to get away with being as rude as he wanted to, whenever he wanted to.

"I failed it."

Raito just hated the sensation of fizzy drink heading into his nostrils from the intersection of swallowing and surprise.

"You what?" he blurted when he could speak again.

The detective on the other end of the chain gave him a look that Raito interpreted, from long practice, as sarcastic. Novices would term it 'blank'. "Ironically enough, I do not enjoy being investigated."

"You do like your secrets." Look, he could be sarcastic too!

"I need my secrets," L pointed out didactically.

And Raito was just _so_ not going there. "So, how did you manage to fail an IQ test? Is that even possible? I suppose you've already answered why you would."

L smiled around his thumb. "I was very little, so he thought it best to have it given aloud, by a psychologist, instead of in a written format. Never mind that I could already read faster than he."

Anxious to keep the words flowing—had L ever volunteered information like this?—Raito inserted, "They put an actual person in the room for you to manipulate? What did you _do_ to the poor man?"

"Absolutely nothing."

L had the deadpan void-stare down pat, and Raito wasn't even going to try to coin one of his own in competition. Instead, he tugged very gently on the chain in an effort to convey impatience.

His companion ate a handful of chocolate chips, and announced, "I fell asleep."

"You didn't!" _He would!_

"It was boring," L explained with perfect equilibrium, as if that was a perfectly good reason to fail an IQ test.

Raito raised one eyebrow sarcastically. "And you just really liked messing with his mind, didn't you?"

Oh, and now the smile was venomous. "I can honestly say, Raito-kun, that I have never quite outgrown being an absolute brat."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Brat-Chibi-L WILL make an appearance later on. Because he's _so_ much fun, and because I promised Kokoro I would.


	3. Devil's Chess

**Ficlet Three:**** Devil's Chess**

**Warning: **Extremely mild shonen-ai. Vague spoilers for the existence of the heirs.

**Disclaimer: **The only thing in this story that I own is the game and rules of devil's chess. I actually invented devil's chess one insomnia-ridden night (like that narrows it down, huh?) for the Yu Yu Hakusho fandom, because I'd read a handful of stories where Hiei and Kurama play chess. The series is all about overdoing it, so I invented a game of super-chess for them. The story was never written. Go. Figure. (N.B. I will never, in a million years, be smart enough to play devil's chess.)

**Author's Note: **Promises, procrastination, promises, procrastination…yet another story that isn't either of the Le'letha-official 'denial-fics', but is an **AU past book 7**. See, my problem is that to write the denial-fics, I'm going to have to reread book 7. I'll have to admit it to deny it. (frustration!) Also, this is much longer than my last two stories, moving from drabble-land into full-length oneshot, to the point where it should almost be posted separately. But it's not.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

In the end, it all came down to sheer bloody-minded paranoia.

Specifically, L's intimate familiarity with crime scenes and the corruption of evidence, and his insistence that all the members of the task force—himself and Raito Yagami included—wear gloves.

Gloves meant no skin contact with the black Death Note found in Higuchi's car; no skin contact meant no restored memories or shinigami sightings; and no memories meant that Rem was left confused and without orders.

It also meant that Raito Yagami returned to headquarters still chained to the wide-eyed, thoughtful detective, and with absolutely no awareness of how close he'd come to destroying his worst enemy and subsequently ruling the world mostly uncontested for several years.

L hated to close a case so clumsily, but he really wanted the Kira murders _stopped_…and some sixth sense made him more cautious than ever, perhaps telling him how closely he had escaped defeat.

He kept silent about his theories regarding Raito and Misa Amane, not wanting to provoke either into defending themselves.

With no one controlling her, Misa panicked. She pleaded with Rem to remove her memories of the notebooks, confident that she would keep her love for Raito. Misa returned to her obsessive actress persona, again with no memories of being Kira. The Death Note that Kira had buried remained buried, far off the beaten track and unlikely to ever be found again.

L noted the change, and concluded that it was for the best, if only because it removed the possibility of the second Kira reemerging. He did not welcome the continuance of her obsession with Raito, if only because she was loud and intrusive.

The little detective had read the instructions engraved on the front and back inside covers, and had eventually announced that they didn't really need the notebook to convict Higuchi. Because of the curious natures of some of the recorded Kira murders, L didn't believe the rule about destroying the notebook. The Death Note burned. Raito watched, hours before the chains were to be removed, with L at his side and only the faintest feeling of disquiet in him. It manifested as curiosity about the notebook, and disgust at both Higuchi and whoever the second Kira had been.

Rem and Ryuk, confused, agreed as to what to do, but had different reasons. Rem frankly didn't care. With Misa safe, she could return to the shinigami realm knowing that the little model she was so fond of was in no danger. Ryuk opted to return as well, but only because one of the extra notebooks had been destroyed and the other one lost. He added that if Raito ever did regain his memories, he wanted to be on a whole separate plane rather than deal with an angry Raito Yagami whose plan had gotten screwed up.

Finally, as the dust began to settle, Soichiro Yagami asked what was going to happen to Raito.

"I still believe," L said, curled in a chair comfortably, "that Raito-kun was, at some point, the original Kira."

"Ryuzaki!" both Yagami men shouted at him simultaneously.

"However," stressed L, holding up one long finger for silence, "I do not believe that he is Kira _now_."

This mollified his audience somewhat.

"But I would like to keep an eye on him."

"What," Raito said flatly, knowing he wasn't going to like the next few words out of the detective's mouth.

"Raito-kun wants to be a detective. He can work with me," L said sunnily.

Raito thought that over for a second, and then came out with "What the HELL?"

What L was actually proposing was a form of protective custody. He did want to keep watch on Raito; he had also, to his great surprise, enjoyed the teen's company (despite the handcuffs that made it a twenty-four/seven demand). At least, the first was the excuse he gave—the latter went unspoken.

Raito told Misa that he'd be back soon, and hoped to hell that her time sense was as far gone as her dignity.

* * *

**Three Months Later:**

Raito knew they were in the U.S; beyond that it could be anywhere, as the house was extremely remote. L had made it very clear that if he started to get too nosy, they would pack up and go somewhere else. (He was glad that he spoke English, although L seemed perfectly fluent in either language. Depending on random factors, they spoke a mixture of the two.)

"You're not seriously going to move all this stuff," Raito had fired back, sweeping a descriptive arm around the comfortably furnished, four-story house the two prodigies and Watari were currently inhabiting.

"No," L agreed mildly. "Just the computers, really, and we could leave those behind too if we had to. This is just one of several safe houses."

And Raito had to be content with that. L was the king of secrets.

Seeing as they'd spent the last few months in enforced companionship, the next three weren't so bad, seeing as they could now retreat to opposite ends of the house when they got into fights, which they inevitably did.

Raito spent plenty of time on the computer keeping up with college—he continued to make smart remarks to L, who mainly ignored him, about some people having a life—and collaborating with L on more cases, none of them approaching the lurid scale of the Kira case.

"Good," said L when Raito mentioned this.

Watari and Raito spent the first month avoiding each other out of mutual dislike. Then L did something wacky, as he was prone to doing, and Raito looked over at the elderly man and rolled his eyes. Looking like it was against his will, Watari smirked agreement. Common ground meant a truce, but they'd never really like each other, partly because Raito kept leaving bruises all over his childish employer.

"And you know _everything_ about me!" Raito shouted during one of their fights, following the statement up with a mean right hook. L dodged it, failed to completely evade his left fist, and rolled with it, snapping Raito's feet out from under him. Clambering off the floor before the older man could press his advantage, he yelled, "I _hate_ that!"

Watari let them fight for a few minutes before rapping on the door and telling them to break it up. Through unspoken agreement, that was the signal for them to shoot furious glares at each other and spend the rest of the week cautiously planning daily schedules that wouldn't intersect.

Because of this, Raito was extremely surprised to hear a knock on his bedroom door that evening. He considered not answering, but his curiosity got the better of him.

It improved his mood a little bit to see that L was sporting a black eye, making him look even more like a lopsided raccoon than usual.

"What?" he asked curtly, ready to close the door.

"Raito-kun is mad at me," L told the air.

"Yes, I am. You know everything about me; I know nothing about you. It's extremely annoying."

"I worked for your secrets, Raito-kun," L pointed out. "But I'll play you for mine."

"Are you going to make sense, or is this not one of those days?"

L presented him with a box, which Raito accepted more out of surprise than anything. The detective used that moment of confusion to slip past his companion—by the time the teen caught up with him, L was crouched on his bed watching him.

"Hey! —what is this?"

"It's a game," L explained. "I invented it one day when I was bored, but no one's been able to play it with me because it's complicated and takes a lot of patience."

He accepted the box back from Raito to prevent being hit with it and started to unpack its contents before looking around and moving to the floor. Interest piqued, Raito joined him somewhat reluctantly.

Laying a regular chessboard out, L proceeded to set up a board four times the size. The 64-square area of the typical board was outlined by a darker line in the center of it. In only a few seconds, he had the larger board attached to the normal one, supported a few inches up in the air by slim stands. To this, he added three four-by-four boards that hovered adjacent to the largest board.

"Three-dimensional chess," said Raito.

"Yes, but by my own rules. The first level has the same rules as any game of chess; however, pieces can move not only forward but upward to their corresponding positions on the second level as well. When pawns are put on the second level, then they can move in all directions; however, they are still limited to taking pieces diagonally."

"And these smaller boards…can any pieces move up there?"

"Any piece from the second level," L qualified. "Pieces can also move down from any level, and can take opponents vertically as well."

Raito was forced to admit that the game was, "Tricky. What are those?"

L examined a red piece, holding it gingerly. "Neutral players. Either player can use them for any purpose; their functions and abilities remain the same." He passed one to Raito to examine while placing the remaining red pieces on second-level squares marked, as Raito now saw, with a small red shape.

"I think I understand," Raito said finally, depositing the piece he still had on the empty spot. "One question though. Why are we playing this, and how does it relate to that black eye you're sporting?"

One of L's hands twitched, as if fighting not to poke the tender bruise. He settled, as expected, for putting it in his mouth instead. "If you win, I'll tell you one of my secrets."

"And if I lose? You already _know_ all of mine."

"I invented the game; it's to be expected," L said without a trace of irony, even to Raito's experienced powers of observation. "When you lose then you just have to play again when I challenge you to another game. If you get bored, or don't like what I tell you, you can stop—but only if you win."

There had to be a catch, but Raito was intrigued enough by the strategy involved in the game that he agreed.

He lost the first game he played.

He also lost the next three in a row. L wasn't one to let him win out of sympathy, and if he did, it would mean nothing.

* * *

They played on and off, sometimes leaving a game in progress for days when L's cases took up their attention or they wanted to think about moves in advance. It was weeks before Raito finally triumphantly called, "Checkmate!"

"Hm," L admitted, fingers to mouth. "Correct. I owe you a secret."

Clearing the remaining pieces off the board, Raito watched the scruffy young man from the corner of his eye curiously.

"My first secret," L announced as Raito separated the three miniature boards, "is this."

It took a second for the teen to realize what his companion was getting at, but when he did, he jumped, dropping the board.

L was sitting across from him…but he was, in fact, sitting, one leg crossed in front of him, the other casually supporting his right wrist.

"You said that made your reasoning ability drop by…" he tried to recall the exact number L had quoted to him in that coffee shop so long ago.

"Forty percent," the detective finished for him. "When out in the open or around other people, it does, because that forty percent would otherwise be focused on crippling paranoia and defensiveness. However, I don't feel threatened here and now."

Raito wasn't sure if he felt complimented or not.

* * *

Weeks later, after mixing devil's chess and a white slavery smuggling case in brain-frying combinations, L admitted to Raito that "My second secret is that Watari mixes crushed vitamin supplements in with almost everything I eat, and we both pretend that I don't know."

* * *

Raito lost several games in quick succession for a while, but he appreciated the fact that L hadn't gotten bored with the whole thing and called it off.

"Where did you get this?" he asked after finally winning a match. "And that doesn't count as a secret."

"I know someone who is very good at making things like this," L told him. "I doubt you will ever meet. As for my third secret, it is that I refused to speak to another living soul until I was almost five years old, although I was perfectly fluent in two languages by then. I made up for silence by being inscrutable or obnoxious in turns."

"I believe it," Raito told him.

* * *

They got the man in the end, but not before he sabotaged several government databases, sending various systems and agencies into chaos. Raito enjoyed the double strategy of hacking into government systems from one side while L waltzed in with full permission from another.

However, it put L into a bad mood for some reason—perhaps not even he could explain why.

"I don't know how to laugh," L contributed as his 'secret' when Raito successfully got past his half-hearted defense.

Surprised, Raito objected, "Sure you do. I've seen you laugh."

"You've seen actions you interpret as a laugh, and they are my version of laughter, but I don't know how to laugh like other people do," L corrected him glumly.

"Surely you don't expect me to believe that. Even babies laugh, L!"

"I don't," said L, and the subject was closed.

* * *

"Checkmate. Finally—that took what, four weeks?"

"Three weeks, five days…you don't want the rest, do you?"

"Some days, L, I hate that internal clock of yours," Raito told him, examining a knight closely. "How you keep track across time zones is beyond me."

"That's not a secret," L said grumpily, curled back into his regular knees-to-chest posture. "I can't explain it myself. It just works."

Raito gave the older detective a critical once-over. "Judging by your body language…which _mumbles_ half the time, for crying out loud…you really don't like this secret, do you?"

"Mm." L put a thumb to his lips and chewed on it for a second. "This secret—don't ask for details—is that there was once another person who looked extremely similar to me."

"You had a twin?"

"_NO_. He just looked like me, and was a very capable mimic." L paused to further abuse his thumb. "I got the name Ryuzaki from him," he admitted.

L had asked him not to probe for details, but as he was volunteering details on his own, Raito decided that it couldn't hurt to ask. The worst L would probably do was spend the next three days hiding. "What happened to him?"

With his free hand, the detective brushed the question away. "It was long ago, and in another country…sort of."

It took Raito a few evenings to remember that the quote L had paraphrased ended with, 'and, besides, the wench is dead.'

* * *

L left the house in the middle of December—on his own—leaving Raito finishing a hefty paper and Watari resenting the fact that someone had to stay behind to keep an eye on the teen.

"I didn't see them last year, or the year before that," Raito overheard L explaining to his guardian in the most irritating voice of pure reason in the _world_, "but there's absolutely nothing stopping me now."

Watari obviously wasn't happy about letting L, who couldn't be trusted to walk into a grocery store, travel alone, but L had stopped listening at about that point, and did as he pleased anyway, as he always did.

Without L as common ground between the two, Raito didn't really want to interact with the elderly man. He stayed in his room working on his paper, punctuated by periodic excursions to the kitchen.

On the twenty-fifth, the phone rang unexpectedly, and when Raito peeked out of his room, he found Watari listening to the speaker as if he hadn't moved in a while, a fond grin on his face.

Catching sight of Raito lurking in the doorway, Watari interrupted the inaudible flow of words on the other end with, "Could you give L the phone again, please? Thank you…" After a brief pause, he said, "Yeah, L, one second—" and extended the phone to Raito, who accepted it in surprise.

"Hello?"

"Raito-kun is on the phone," L announced. L had explained that he made remarks like that because he was used to correlating evidence on his own, but still, L, _duh!_ "Hello, Raito-kun." The teen couldn't swear to it, but the background non-noise seemed to be that of quite a lot of people eavesdropping. L's statement may not have been as random as it had seemed.

"Hey. Where on earth did you go off to?"

"Secret," L said happily. "Tell you when I get back. Which will be," he preempted Raito's next question, "whenever I feel like it."

"Oh, I dread that sentence; I never know what's going to come of it."

"Raito-kun is always perceptive. Give the phone back to Watari again now—we interrupted."

"See you soon," Raito told him, and returned the phone, wondering absently why he'd said something so banal.

L called again a week later, this time to ask Watari to pick him up.

"Thanks to Watari," he told Raito, not unhappily, "I've heard more theories about who you are than I ever wanted to hear."

"Did they—whoever they are—figure it out in the end?"

"Sort of. And I will tell you where I went when you earn it."

That was clearly a challenge, so Raito dragged L (and a heavy blanket and a mug of hot chocolate and three bags of marshmallows _and_ a chocolate bar) upstairs to start a new game (and L still insisted on turning the thermostat up).

"It's cold," he explained through a concoction that could have been hot chocolate if it hadn't been reduced to sludge. L's idea of a beverage was something you could stand a spoon up in.

Raito was really curious, so he played harder than ever, beating L on the first game.

"Raito-kun is good at devil's chess," L said happily.

"And you went where?" Raito reminded him, not to be deterred, even by rare compliments.

"Mmph," said L through a marshmallow. "To see the children."

"The what?" He couldn't help but suspect that L was enjoying the face he'd made.

"The idea was that we'd put the brightest children we could find together, because trust me, being all on your own in the midst of children that you are a thousand times brighter than is a horrible way to be. I grew up there—when I wasn't busy—as the first group was collected just to give me some sort of socialization. It didn't work," the detective added matter-of-factly.

Raito thought about it—processing _L_ and _children_ and _genius children_ together—and came up with, "Backups?"

"Raito-kun is clever," L told the remains of his hot chocolate. "When I—and I quote—'pull some damn-fool stunt' and get myself killed, one of them will replace me as L."

_When I get killed_, not _if_, Raito noted, and why did that bother him so much? "So why did you ask me to take over during the Kira case?" he asked.

"Because you were there, of course," L shrugged, "and they are young."

"Younger than you were?" Raito asked slyly.

"No."

"They must be incredible. Do I ever get to meet these kids?"

L chewed on a finger for lack of another marshmallow. "I'll think about it."

* * *

"Don't tell me you're sulking over losing, L," Raito chided him several weeks later. "It happens."

"I thought you'd be bored by now," L muttered into his knees. _Drat,_ Raito thought, _defensive again. We're never going to get completely past that, are we? _

"We're getting to secrets I don't want to tell…"

It was true, Raito realized—each progressive secret that he'd earned had been more and more personal.

"You started this, L, and you can end it whenever you please," Raito reminded him. "But only when you win a game, and this time I won. That means you owe me a secret."

Unhappily, L said, "I know," but stayed silent.

Seeing as he wasn't going to get anything else out of him, either secret or help, Raito packed up the rest of the game board by himself. Spontaneously, he shoved the box to one side and bridged the distance between them with a tentative hand, risking L's dislike of touch.

Although obviously surprised, L turned one hand upward, gripping Raito's firmly. Raito was equally startled—L seemed almost reassured by the contact.

"I told you my name when first we met," L eventually whispered shyly. "My name _is_ L."

He volunteered neither family name nor any explanation, and Raito, knowing when he had pushed the detective to his limits, let it lie.

…however, he did test him just a little bit further by laying a gentle hand on his wild, scruffy hair before leaving.

* * *

The tension in the air between them was unbearable, and Raito started a new round in the hopes of relieving it.

L fought him harder than ever, beating him soundly with stubbornness and cunning born, Raito was sure, of fear.

_Damn!_ Raito swore silently. _Whatever's eating him, we'll never solve it this way!_

To his _immense_ surprise, however, L not only agreed to play again the next day, but challenged him directly, looking like even _he_ didn't understand why he did so.

And repeatedly so, when he continued to win matches, until Raito wondered whether L's greatest battle was with Raito or himself.

Finally, fed up of the tension and taking shameless advantage of the fact that L was clearly very, very distracted over something, he managed to corner L's king and declare the game over.

Protectively, L curled up into a ball again, visibly distressed.

Well, it had worked last time, so there was no reason it shouldn't work again, right? Raito reached out to him again, linking their hands.

"I didn't think you'd get this far," L whimpered. "I thought you'd get bored…"

Raito's heart clenched with a combination of pity and anger. He gritted his teeth, but decided to take pity on his friend.

"You know what, L? I'm irritated as all hell that you want to renege on this, but damn it, you're my friend, and I hate seeing you like this. So if you don't want to tell me, fine, don't tell me. Or make up something trivial and leave it at that, and I'll never know the difference, will I? As far as I know you've made up everything you've told me, but I don't think you've done that, and that's wonderful. I realize you don't want to tell me your secrets, and I'm touched that you've done what you've done so far. Forget it. It's all right."

L's hands tightened on his—Raito was reminded again that he was _much_ stronger than he looked—and it was a long time before he spoke.

"This is my last secret," he whispered, "and I'll never speak of it again if you don't want me to. I find myself hopelessly attracted to you, Raito-kun, but I won't ever act on it because you _are_ my friend and I can't lose that, I just can't."

He was silent again—Raito was processing what he'd just heard—and then added in a lower voice than ever, "Please let go."

Raito released his hands automatically, and L pulled away from him, clambering off the ground awkwardly and retreating towards the door.

"L, wait!" he cried suddenly.

Shoulders hunched more in misery than defensiveness, L stopped at the door, but didn't turn around.

Cautiously, Raito rose too and followed him. He rested his hand very gingerly on L's shoulder; he flinched away nonetheless. Irked, Raito shifted his grip to the man's bicep, keeping him in place (unless he chose to make a fight of it).

"You think I'm mad at you, don't you?"

Defiantly, L turned his face away as far as it would go.

"L, look at me."

Black hair flew in a vehement _no_.

Raito stubbornly reached around him, pressing his free hand against L's cheek and attempting to pull him back around. L shoved him—not hard enough to make him let go, but enough to communicate _don't_.

Fine, if he was going to be that way, Raito would get his point across nonetheless. Before L could react, he shifted position slightly and pulled the detective into a hug.

He could _feel_ the other man's surprise and confusion—he tensed even further and long fingers fluttered at his side, as if not sure if he should push him away or embrace him.

Not speaking, not moving, Raito held him until he settled down somewhat, letting his head fall onto Raito's shoulder.

_You really don't know how to deal with emotions, attraction least of all, do you, L?_ Raito thought. _Now, to scare him further or not…_

What settled it was that L had said he wouldn't speak of it again, and although he'd probably figured out, genius that he was, that Raito didn't mind, the younger really didn't want to have to start this conversation over again from scratch.

So instead, he simply moved one hand to L's cheek and kissed him.

L reacted as Raito had expected he would—the combination of surprise and delight froze him solid.

Pulling away before he scared the detective too much, Raito tilted his chin up with the conveniently placed hand and whispered to him, "I don't mind at all."

Oh, this was going to make life much more interesting.

* * *

**Author's Note:** I don't write straight pairings well because there's no common ground. This turned a bit more personal than I intended, as I sympathize with L here.

**Next:** (and it _will_ be next, because it's already written) Le'letha takes on the notorious Fifty-Sentence Challenge.


	4. Challenge

**Ficlet Four: Challenge**

**Author's Note: **I enjoy fifty-sentence challenges, and randomly decided to do one of my own when the first sentence below popped into my head and actually had a ring to it…Le'letha's Big Muse Strategy™ is to play Solitaire and let her mind wander. All prompts below are of my own extremely haphazard invention, except for three which my brother suggested—he really wanted 'yellow' in here for some reason.

**Warning: **Contains spoilers, I suppose, for the existence of the heirs and certain real names, as well as pre- (Raito/L) and (Matt/Mello) slash hints that can be interpreted as just friendship if you like. (I wrote them as pre-slash, though.)

**Disclaimer:** I have no right to put my fingerprints all over this wonderful series, but I will anyway. I also don't own the poem L quotes in one prompt…anyone who recognizes it may challenge me to a scenario if they like. What I _do_ own is three tickets to the May 20th showing of the _Death Note_ live action movie! (spazzz…)

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

**1: Ending:** L watched Kira die (you can never prove this—he is too good to let you—but it is so) and although he knew that Raito-kun had been dead ever since he picked up that notebook, it still hurt to watch the light fade from his eyes.

**2: Alien:** A leading law enforcement official was once heard to remark that the mysterious detective L could be a three-eyed unicorn from Alpha Centauri for all he cared—the man (whoever he was, if he was a man) got the impossible done.

**3: Mirror:** Near considered L to be father and brother and twin to him; and if he ever shared his theory, anyone who saw the two together would have been forced to admit that he had a point.

**4: Simple:** "It's really quite simple," L said fairly cheerfully, and Watari couldn't suppress a shudder; whenever the child said that, it was inevitable that whatever it was (this time) was really quite _not_.

**5: Mistake:** Finally tired of the inevitable double-take that involved a first encounter with Mello, the blond devised a foolproof strategy to immediately resolve the boy/girl question, and most people subsequently retreated quickly wondering if the boy was always that aggressive.

**6: Alone:** L's habitual reaction to an excess of human contact was to disappear, sometimes for days at a time, and more than one fight broke out between him and Raito because L couldn't deal with the constant presence.

**7: Snow:** The child informed him absently that everything had a pattern to it, and if you could see the pattern you could see the rest of it too; Watari joked that if the little one ever got bored of being a detective, he could predict the weather—L looked thoughtful before announcing with the greatest of confidence that it would snow on Wednesday.

**8: Smoke:** Raito was fairly sure that most of the detective's odder quirks were merely smokescreens to distract from how clever he really was, but he never quite worked up the daring to confront his companion directly.

**9: Revenge:** Near took quiet pleasure in constructing Mello-proof productions that stubbornly stayed up even when all the obvious supports were removed.

**10: Proof:** The boy was Kira, he knew that beyond a doubt in a way he couldn't put into words, but he scrambled for proof because he was helplessly fascinated by the person behind the murderer.

**11: Order:** L dealt with orders he didn't like in a variety of different ways—he would pretend he hadn't heard, stare at the other person until they panicked, or get revenge; luckily he rarely bothered to exert the effort involved in payback.

**12: Language:** Quillsh Wammy despaired of arguing with the tiny genius almost instantly, as it was extremely disturbing to hear the mix of cutting irony and reasoned rhetoric from the body of an eight-year-old boy.

**13: Honesty:** "You are feeding your children to the wolves," Near stated serenely as L outlined their three roles in his long game of justice and vengeance; L looked him straight in the eye and said just as calmly that yes, he knew.

**14: Night:** "But I do sleep sometimes," L replied indignantly when Raito asked him what he did all night instead of sleeping, "or think, or play memory games, and sometimes, when I listen to you, I can hear what you dream," and honestly didn't understand why his companion promptly whacked him with the nearest pillow and ordered him not to do that anymore, blushing.

**15: Cold:** Watari doubled the amount of attention he paid to L when the ten-year-old mistakenly decided to fight an elevated fever with a substantial dose of cold medicine far too high for his meager body weight; dealing with a wildly hallucinating L was not something he wanted to do more than once a decade.

**16: Heat:** Everything was war between them, and the room temperature was a constant source of struggle; Raito wanted it left at a reasonable heat, while L insisted that he hated the cold and stubbornly transformed their room into a furnace on a regular basis.

**17: Pride:** He hated to ask L for help during their interminable data searches, but it was a fact that the elder man could read many more languages than Raito could.

**18: Understatement:** "…I learn quickly…" said L meekly, a comment which had to be in the running for the Understatement of the Century award.

**19: Barrier:** Mello and Matt ended up on the run from various authority figures so often that they resorted to turning Mello's room into a fortress, complete with entertainment and supplies and internet access, and it wasn't until weeks later that Matt realized that he and all his stuff had somehow moved into Mello's room, as if he'd never intended to leave.

**20: Water:** Well aware of the trouble L got into on a regular basis, Watari put his foot down over learning to swim; the child would never be good at it, but hopefully he wouldn't drown either.

**21: Rule:** It was an unwritten philosophy at Wammy's House that it was that it was the height of rudeness to try to learn someone else's true name, and even the closest of friends never thought twice about it; who they were now was more important than who they'd been.

**22: Law:** Between the two of them, L and Near assembled a fantastic, sprawling construction that filled the entire room and incorporated fifteen different mediums—and never noticed that, to do so, they'd forgotten not only the law of gravity but three different precepts of geometry.

**23: Number:** "Go away, I'm counting the stars," the child told him, and Watari looked down at the boy sprawled on the hallway floor and up at the four stories of the house above him, then down again, and decided not to ask.

**24: Pillow:** Raito didn't think L knew how to laugh until a truly spectacular spontaneous pillow fight had erupted between the two of them, leaving Raito conqueror of the bed and L curled on the ground at the limit of the chain with two fingers pressed hard against his lips to hold in mirth he couldn't articulate, eyes glowing with a spark the younger had never seen there before.

**25: Yellow:** "No, we don't have any plans to paint the kitchen right now, Matt, and if we did, it certainly wouldn't be that horrible shade…oh, what have you two done now?"

**26: Traitor:** L knew, _knew_ without a doubt when Raito touched the notebook again that the brilliant youth he'd come to care for was gone and what was going to happen, and he knew (had always known) that there was nothing he could do about it—he just didn't expect the betrayal to hurt so much.

**27: Identity:** It had only been an idle question that he didn't expect an answer for, and Raito was left gaping when the stranger who had suddenly replaced the man at his side winked at him and sauntered out of the room; it took a few seconds later for him to reconcile his subconscious impressions and his thoughts and blurt, "Deneuve is a woman?"

**28: Noise:** Near didn't hate Mello the way the blond hated him; however, he acknowledged ruefully, shaking his pale head to dispel the ringing in his ears Mello's random visit had left him with, he often wished his fellow student and rival wasn't quite so loud.

**29: Sleep:** Some days he was just so tired, in a way sleep couldn't dispel and sugar couldn't stave off, but he had never known another existence than the one he was living, and couldn't conceive of any other way to be.

**30: Retreat:** Watari had found most of the places in various residences that L ran to when in a fit of sulking, but he'd never managed to locate the nest of sheets and pillows and clothes the child had made at the bottom of an extensive wardrobe.

**31: Travel:** Packing L and his computers up and moving somewhere else got easier with practice, but the biggest problem was always L versus the seatbelts.

**32: Game:** "Probably for the same reason you do, Raito-kun," L replied thoughtfully to his companion's question about why he liked tennis, "in that even if you are forced to work with a team, in the end it's just you and your opponent who matter."

**33: Name:** It had been so long since he had heard his family name spoken that he doubted he would answer to it anymore; the little Lawliet child almost didn't exist any longer.

**34: Enemy:** Matt could have been one of L's heirs, but after seeing how Mello reacted to being set against Near, he turned the detective down for fear of losing his best friend to the blond's desire to succeed.

**35: Letters:** "I…you…L, why?" one of the men unfortunate to be put in charge of the strange orphan boy demanded after a particularly spectacular incident of Not Fitting In; the child promptly informed him that monogrammatical sentences would not be tolerated, leaving the poor man very confused until he replayed the outburst in his head several times.

**36: Insult:** Matt heard all the slurs against his devotion to Mello, but only once; anyone going up against one of them was promptly sworn revenge on by both, which usually resulted in the pair being given plenty of space from then on out.

**37: Outgrow:** L's powers of perception developed far before his mastery of human language, and the dialect he developed all by himself, for himself, persisted until he was about fifteen, used mostly to air his theories to no one, muttering under his breath; it was replaced by a Babel composed of fragments of living languages.

**38: Easier:** The task force welcomed the pseudonym 'Ryuzaki' with relief, as most of them had been forced to bastardize 'L' into the syllable 'Eru', and it was getting on the detective's nerves as much as theirs.

**39: Touch:** L disliked physical contact, accepting it only when necessary and (with more willingness) from his heirs; he was therefore surprised to realize that not only did he not mind the occasional touch from Raito-kun, but he had actually initiated the contact himself from time to time.

**40: Hands:** "You have very long fingers, Ryuzaki," Raito remarked during one hard-won not-looking-at-the-computers break, and L tilted his head to one side and stared at his hands before splaying his fingers out next to Raito's, acknowledging the difference with a faint sound of vague surprise.

**41: Sick:** Mello had ruled that sickness was covered under the bounds of camaraderie; therefore any time minor illnesses made the rounds of the House was a quiet one, as both he and Matt ended up in bed too miserable to make trouble.

**42: Curiosity:** "Raito-kun," L asked in all innocence, "why does Amane-san still insist that you are in love with her?"

**43: Holiday:** L showed up at the House pretty regularly for Christmas, more because it was impossible to trace two people among the holiday traffic than for the religious connotations, but he was prone to appearing at random moments throughout the year as time allowed—it was, after all, the closest thing he had to a home base.

**44: Jealousy:** Mello loved L dearly, he really did, but that chocolate had been _his_, dammit, and there was no way he was going to let L get away with stealing it just because he was L!

**45: Blanket:** Disturbed by the thunderstorm breaking above their heads, Near sought refuge in the familiar playroom only to find that L was already there, watching the storm; they exchanged glances in the split-second of lightning, and L moved so that the pale boy could sit with him, blanket wrapped around them both.

**46: Slip:** "L," Raito said, drawing his attention to something minor but interesting, "do you know—" and then registered the half-hidden glance shot his way, full of suspicion, and sorrow, and fear, but not surprise.

**47: Cut:** "Absolutely not," the little one said irritably, glaring at his guardian from behind his scruffy, overlong black hair and over the book he was reading, "_I'll_ cut it when it starts to bother me, and not before, so put those scissors away."

**48: Prophetic:** "'Eye to eye, and head to head,'" said L softly… "No, it's not important, Raito-kun."

**49: Disturbance:** "Mello," L said tartly, leaning over the balcony to catch the attention of the boy and his red-headed shadow, "you may do as you like, of course, but not to the extent that Roger feels the need to drag me out of my study to shout at you."

**50: Mutual:** Raito noticed that L was spending more time than usual watching him and chewing on his fingers, but when asked, L only replied, "You confuse me, Raito-kun,"; Raito gave him a dubious look and told the detective that it was only fair—he confused him too.


	5. Echo

**Ficlet Five: Echo**

**Author's Note:** So I was reading this book…which, okay, doesn't narrow it down a whole lot, because I read books the way some people climb mountains or jump off cliffs—because it's _there_. It's called _Son-Rise_ and is about an autistic boy whose family made it their personal project—independently—to pull him out of it. He had trouble interacting with other people, but would play with inanimate objects for hours on end. When given mental stimulation, he accelerated beyond anyone's wildest dreams. I didn't add two and two until I got to the pictures. The child in question had curly hair, a baby-face, and huge dark eyes. This is me: 'mustn't shout or squeak, I'm in a classroom, but _oh, my gosh, that's Near!_'

**Disclaimer:** I own whatever's made up, including pipe dreams and spider-webs (not literally: I mean anything I feel like adding to fill gaps that were never proven in context). I don't own those-whom-we-love; put anyone you like in that category.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

There's something; he can feel it.

L knows, on one level, that it is illogical to begin from a conclusion and then use logic to connect beginning to end, but on another level, it always has worked so far. He can never explain it, but it has never failed him, and since when did he have to explain himself to anyone, really?

The fifteen-year-old, relatively satisfied with the current situation, puts one finger to his lips thoughtfully, watching the adults chat. One he knows—has been in charge of raising him, inasmuch as the word can be applied to a child who had, three years ago, cussed out Interpol over something they'd done that he didn't like—but the other was a relative stranger. And that's all right—L doesn't mind strangers as long as they leave him alone. Preferably with a computer, because ten minutes later he'll know more about them than they remember about themselves.

He wishes that Mr. Wammy and the other man—Daven, he recalled—would go away and leave him alone so he can run off and find whatever is nagging at the corner of his mind. He has a feeling (a very good feeling) that it is a 'whoever' and not a 'what', and that makes him even more curious.

He's curled in one of his favorite chairs in Roger's study, reading an extremely tedious but important evidence report and getting sticky smudges all over it from a lollipop—well, truth be told, a series of lollipops. (He is also hiding from B, in a way designed to seem like he wasn't even bothering to hide and was in fact not even acknowledging the younger child's disturbing existence.) Through the haze of official phrasing and data, he's also listening to Roger and Quillsh Wammy sort through their own stack of information.

Something catches his attention—he doesn't quite register what—and he shifts his main focus from the document to the adults—while still reading, of course.

"Seems we're getting a reputation for dealing with difficult children," Roger says wryly, shoving a letter across the table to his brother-in-law.

"Who is it now?"

"One Mr. Samuel Daven, from America. He didn't specify anything more than 'difficult'."

L drops the document at this point (all over the floor, but he knows where he was) and joins the adults at the table, snatching the letter away from Wammy, who surrenders it without a fuss. (L is prone to doing this. The man is used to it.)

The child-detective perches on the edge of the table, a habit he acquired back when he was forced to climb on tables to look adults in the eye and has not gotten rid of yet, and scrutinizes the paper. What he's looking for, he can't specify. Roger anticipates him and passes him the envelope as well.

"Are you going?" L asks finally, turning his eyes onto his guardian.

"Yes, I thought I would," Wammy replies calmly, just to see what his brilliant young charge will do.

He is not disappointed. "I'm coming too."

"Any reason?" he hazards.

L taps his thumbnail against his teeth meditatively, and finally comes out with, "There's something…when I figure it out, I'll let you know."

* * *

So here they are, in North Dakota, of all places, and L's internal radar is telling him that there _is_ something or someone here. He really wants to go and investigate, but he's promised to behave and act like a normal child until the director takes his eyes off him.

(This, of course, does not extend to sitting normally, because he does have limits, and it's not wise to push them. L overreacts fantastically when pushed. Few people try it twice.)

Finally, Daven rises and invites Mr. Wammy to review some files with him, and they move to leave the room. Daven hesitates in the doorway, as if to address L, but Wammy is well familiar with the effect L has on unprepared other people, and cuts him off.

"Don't worry about him, Mr. Daven; he'll stay out of trouble." The accompanying look, over the other man's shoulder where he can't see it, continues silently, _You'd better!_

L gives him his best blank stare in return.

When he can't hear them anymore, the teenager unfolds his legs from the chair, shucking the shoes he wore under protest, for the sake of appearances, with relish. Leaving them under the chair politely—his own version of politeness—he pads barefooted out another door, following what for the sake of metaphor we must call his nose.

His instincts lead him through hallways, past classrooms, and around dormitories, with a brief foray outside, where the sun burns his too-large eyes painfully, cutting that short. It was wrong anyway, he knew subconsciously.

Silently, he heads back upstairs. _Better._ His feet make no noise on the carpeted floor. _Ssh… _he thinks, and does not wonder why. Wondering why would ruin it.

He touches the tips of overlong fingers to a door; finding it ajar, he pushes it open curiously.

It's a playroom for children younger than him. It's mostly empty—it feels empty, like no one comes here. He finds it peaceful.

No, but wait, he was slightly wrong. There is someone here, all alone. From the doorway, he sees a very young child—he can't be more than three years old—lying idly in the middle of an array of toys.

There's a _pattern_ to it, L sees immediately. It's what he's good at, patterns. But it's…he can't put it into words.

Staying very quiet, he closes the door behind him and locates a chair at what he estimates to be the corner of the little one's vision. Not intrusive, but not hiding either.

He stays there, resolutely not watching anything in particular. Instead, he widens his attention to include the whole room, not focusing on the little boy. In this sort of state, he notices things.

L can feel the emptiness—no one comes in here but the child. But not the loneliness—there's no loneliness emanating from him. Oh, but there it is! The boy has noticed him, and resents the intrusion. But it's a sideways sort of resentment. He knows, but doesn't really care.

He can't resist the urge to move, and automatically places one thumb on his lips, leaving the other casually on his knees. He makes no move to contact the boy, but now that he has his attention, he is perfectly justified in returning it.

Small. Very pale—hair and skin alike. Were it not for the eyes, he would be fairly labeled albino. L is distantly surprised. He very rarely encounters anyone with eyes so like his own. The boy is skinny, but not to the degree L has always been. Also, there's that spark to him, that spark that L and some of the other children share—intelligence, and more than that.

They ignore each other abstractly for half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. L's perfect internal clock keeps track without conscious volition as he watches everything and nothing. The pale boy plays with the toys, moving inanimate objects—no, projecting his own thoughts into them.

L learns languages very quickly (those are simply patterns too), and the little one's movements are just another language. Looking at it that way, he thinks he will be able to join in. But he leaves it a little longer anyway, just to be safe.

Distantly, he hopes Mr. Wammy is keeping Daven very busy. He does not want to be interrupted now.

When the child is looking the other way, L descends from his chair and stops, crouched on the floor a little way from the other boy's territory. Another few minutes go by; he is noticed, registered, considered, and ignored.

Gradually, L comes within easy reach of the complicated array. He is being tolerated, he feels, little more. He follows the child's movements until he's sure he's got the thread of the externalized, silent monologue.

And then he steps in.

_Here I am,_ he says, moving a figure into the sight of the boy's current avatar, if the little plane had eyes.

The boy moves the plane into a different flight path. _Go away._ Or, possibly, _You're not here._

L patiently moves the figure into his field of view again. _No._

With a crash, the child drops the plane, toppling a small structure. L interprets it as the beginnings of what would be, in a different medium, a glare and the threat of tears. He ignores the threat in exactly the way it deserves.

Still surprised at being addressed in his own language, the boy turns to building a wall out of blocks between the two of them.

L matches him block for block. When the little one turns away in a huff (it is a huff, for all of its non-expression), he builds a bridge between the two.

The boy drives a dump truck into it. Pointedly, he takes the blocks that fall into the dump truck and moves them away to build another wall with.

L builds a building. For fun, he makes it appear to defy gravity.

It gets the child's attention, to be sure, but he pretends he's not watching.

Someone else might be fooled. L sees his own practiced clueless stare in the child's cold shoulder—white curls fallen over eyes. In this half-here, half-not state required to address him on his own terms, though, the teenager can see the glint of dark eyes watching him.

He ignores the attention. Two can play at that game—and do.

As he reaches the top of his building, the child shoves a car away, making it roll wildly across the floor. L catches it easily. It was, after all, aimed at him. He chooses to think it wasn't aggressive, but, in fact, a question.

_Who are you? _being a logical follow up from _how did you get here?_ Thus, the car. He has perfect faith in the little one's ability to make abstract connections. The very medium of conversation depends on it.

L borrows some blue blocks and constructs a primitive map across the floor, creating England and the United States. He fills in Europe with a scatter of things no one is using right now. (The little one is still pretending to ignore him, and if anyone was watching, they would see two completely separate games.)

He reaches over to pick up the plane the little one was using earlier. He's allowed to do so.

Absently, he flies the plane from mock-England to mock-middle of the USA, exchanging it for the car and driving it into the boy's assortment of toys. Taking his fingers off it, he puts the ball back in the child's court. _I'm here now. What will you do?_

L is purposely mimicking the pale boy's behavior, sprawled on the floor. It feels vulnerable, and wouldn't like it at all were he in his normal state of mind, but floating free like this, thinking in the patterns of this new language, it doesn't bother him.

The boy picks up a toy seemingly at random and builds a wall of Lego blocks around it. _Don't talk to me. No one talks to me_.

L builds a small tower and puts his own random figure on top of it, where it can see into the boy's makeshift cage. _I can talk to you._

Abruptly, the child knocks things down left, right, and center, searching for something. L is reminded of his own haphazard filing system, which only he understands. While he looks, the teenage detective collects a number of vaguely humanoid figures and puts them in a group.

The boy is distracted, but keeps on with whatever he's doing.

Deliberately, L builds a wall between the group of people and the little one's chosen avatar. _You think you're different from everyone else, don't you?_

It's definitely communication; the boy abandons his search to contribute to the wall. _Yes. _He turns his avatar so its back faces the people and the wall.

_Gotcha,_ L thinks but does not articulate. He moves his figure to stand beside the boy's. The cage still separates them.

It's a long, long moment as L and the child stare at the tableau they've laid out together, lying on the floor, looking like negative images.

Then the little one moves bits and pieces of the cage. There's still a barrier, but not between the two of them. He does not move the two pieces any closer together. Still, it's progress.

From the remaining small figures, L peppers the remains of the map with solitary characters. He lets that remain for a while. Then he starts moving them, one by one, to where mock-England was before they cannibalized it to make walls.

He borrows some of Europe and the bits the pale boy took out of his cage to make a wall around the group. He leaves holes in it.

The pale boy regards this new arrangement with some interest. L lets him consider it.

Finally, he picks up L's figure and moves it to the walled-in group, but there's no hostility in it. He stays facing L, but won't meet his eyes.

Fair enough.

L borrows the plane again. This time, he lands it right beside the boy's avatar.

The child stares at it for a second. He looks at the assembly of lonely figures. Then he ignores it. Instead, he resumes his interrupted search, and this time, L lets him do it.

Eventually, he extracts something that might have been a robot's breastplate at some point. It's shiny, flat, and reflective. L gets the idea even before the pale boy sets it up so that L can see a vague reflection in it.

The teenage detective pulls a magnetic letter "L" out of the depleted heap that had once been mock-Europe, dropping it in between his body and the makeshift mirror. He trusts that the child can read. (After all, L himself had been reading for quite a while at that age.)

He moves the mirror to reflect the little one. It's knocked away. When he tries again, the boy shakes his head no.

L retrieves a handful of letters from various places on the floor, putting some effort into finding a complete set. The pale child watches him, but they still don't make eye contact.

When all the letters are in a heap before him, he reaches out and scatters them around. The only thing he grabs is a lock of his hair, pulling on it.

It's another connection between them. L has had his fingers in and out of his mouth the whole time, as he is accustomed to doing. He's really impressed—the child spots it, and looks at the pale strands and L's fingers in turn.

L doesn't pester him about the letters, but he returns to it of his own accord. The boy does not put them in any sort of order, but collects them together again and pushes them towards L.

Contemplatively, L surveys the board. He retrieves his avatar from the group in mock-England and puts it by the letters. Instantly, the little one reaches for a letter L. They place the toys in the same place at the same time, and the boy follows it up with his figure, clearing an open space for it. In the process, the 'everyone else' area gets knocked over, ignored. _They_ are not important.

He offers the letters to the boy again, but they're still rejected, moved straight back to him. As if he's convinced L's missing the point, the child picks up the plane and puts it between the two of them. He turns it so that it's facing the group in England.

L thinks for a moment, enjoying the language they've built up between them, before selecting a handful of letters. Keeping his fist closed, he holds his hand an inch above the carpet in front of the boy's figure.

Feather-light fingers rest on the back of his hand, pushing it down.

He lets the letters fall, carefully feeling the shape of them as he does so.

N-E-A-R

The pale boy stares at the letters. And at L's avatar. At the plane. At the symbolic group of the isolated ones. Back at the letters.

Then he picks up his avatar and moves it over to L's so that they're barely touching. Figure released, the empty hand brushes L's again. The teenager turns his larger hand over so that their palms are touching.

When he folds his long fingers in, neither pulls away.

* * *

Quillsh Wammy has long since begun to wonder where his teenage charge has gotten to. There's been no sign of him, and he usually turns up wanting sugar before very long. He hopes L would stay out of trouble, but _that child! _Honestly. All that intelligence, not much common sense.

He is relieved, although he doesn't show it, when L appears in the doorway, nudging it aside oddly. He's _surprised_—definitely very surprised—when he realizes that L's hands are occupied with carrying a small child with white hair.

They lock eyes for a second, completely ignoring the befuddled Daven.

"That—but that's—how on earth?"

"Mr. Daven?" Wammy inquires politely.

"That's the child I'm most worried about," Daven sputters. "Nate—but I've never seen him interact with anyone!"

Wammy turns to look at the pair again. The pale boy—Nate?—is clinging to L like a lifeline, face hidden in his neck and shoulder.

"Well, I think he may not be your problem for much longer, Mr. Daven," Wammy predicts, seeing the look in L's dark eyes.

"You think you can help him?"

Without a trace of doubt, he answers, "I know it."

Daven flails for a second more before leaving the three of them alone.

Addressing his charge, Wammy asks directly, "And so who's this, child?"

L's arms tighten around the child, and he looks up. Involuntarily, Wammy draws in a breath in surprise. He has the same intelligent, jet-dark eyes as L.

"This is Near," L tells his guardian assertively. "And he's _mine._"


	6. One Hundred

**Ficlet Six: One Hundred**

**Author's Note:** Well, it's another random fifty-sentence challenge! Surprise! (And YES, Kokoro-kun, I AM doing the story I promised you, namely the logical follow-up from 'Echo'—you can't do a meeting-Near story without doing Mello's side as well. And I'm doing Mello and Near's first meeting too.) But I felt like doing fifty more sentences, thus the chapter title.

**Rant:** Oh! Did I say? I got to go see the first _Death Note_ live action movie when it made the rounds of the US last month. So…much…fun! I went with a couple of friends and spent an entertaining hour or so watching Kokoro dress up as L. Hilarious. Once you got past the whole _dubbed live action film_ thing—advice: don't watch the mouths—it was great. Best line of the movie? Ryuk: "You're in deep sh(t, Light." If he said anything after that, no one noticed. The whole theater CRACKED UP. Myself included. Oh, and they got L perfectly. I ended up declaring "That man is ALL BRASS!" He even managed to redeem the very concept of potato chips. (Now they need to do Fullmetal Alchemist.)

**Warning:** Obvious _but_ _not_ obscene Matt/Mello and L/Raito slash. Also may contain references to _Another Note_.

**Disclaimer:** I own nobody. Nothing. I don't even own the idea of the fifty-sentence challenge.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

**1: Incomprehensible:** "L, child, is there a _reason_ there are five billion sticky notes all over the house, or is this just one of those things that nobody else is meant to understand?"

**2: Retaliation:** "Hm?" L asked, looking up from his book only when Matt tugged on his sleeve and demanded to know whether or not he was going to interfere in the fight; "No, probably not, as there's no actual blood being shed—and Near appears to be giving as good as he gets."

**3: Math:** "E equals _cm_ squared," corrected L whimsically, "because chaos times Matt times Mello produces an emergency."

**4: Reversed:** L didn't understand friendship, and Raito thought nothing of it, so although they were both lying, they were lying on the same wavelength, and that almost made it a twisted, broken truth.

**5: Childish:** "If anyone asks," Mello hissed frantically from under the bed, "we're not here, you haven't seen us, and there's no such thing as bubble bath or pools, ok, L?"

**6: Consequences:** "I suppose I should ask where you two found twenty gallons of bubble bath in the first place, but because not a single girl on campus is speaking to you, I don't think I need to, do I?"

**7: Illusion:** From time to time, Raito would almost believe the façades built up between them, and then, just out of the corner of his eye, Ryuzaki would flicker, and vanish, to be ever-so-briefly replaced by L, who stood forever removed, and the teen would be reminded that no matter what he did, it was L—not Ryuzaki—who was playing this game, and L was dangerous.

**8: Collapse:** Mello came back one day filthy, and quite possibly drunk, and emerged from the bathroom with his hair soaking wet, wearing one of Matt's enormous shirts and not much else, wanting only to be held as the effects wore off.

**9: Feel:** L never set great stock in emotion, but he would gamble everything on the strength of a _feeling_—his instincts convinced him of things that he had no logical proof for, and never played him wrong.

**10: Raw:** "Don't call me that, don't call me that, don't!" the new young L shrieked one day, and Roger fled the room, bemused, as L-who-had-been-Near wept at last for the man who had been parent and brother and beloved to him, and now was lost, and who he could never replace.

**11: Afterthought:** "_L_," Raito growled, stopping short, "you had _better_ tell me that there are no cameras in this room!"

**12: Authority:** Matt watched his blond friend pace helplessly until he got sick of it, and in an uncommon flare of temper told him to stop it and calm down, or would he have to take matters into his own hands?

**13: Truce:** Whenever L showed up at Wammy's House, it was usually after the conclusion of an exhausting case, and Mello and Near wordlessly shelved their rivalry to sneak upstairs and join him in sleep; he never minded their presence.

**14: Poison:** Every word and touch of it was false, and they both knew it, but the kisses were sweeter still for that.

**15: Reason:** "Why?" Matt asked, touching the cross that hung around Mello's neck (because his hands were so close anyway); "To remember," Mello answered—"Remember what?" Matt asked, and Mello answered, "That I forget."

**16: Hypocrisy:** By day, he swore fervently that he would never manipulate the emotions of another for his own gain; by night he played at seducing L, only to discover, to his great surprise, that the little detective was two steps ahead of him in the same game.

**17: Ice:** Matt had died because of his loyalty to his lover, he knew; Mello because his grief had made him careless; L because fascination had stayed his hand; _never me_, Near swore silently, left behind and lonely, _never me._

**18: Copy:** L hated mirrors; they reminded him of the days when the reflection stared back with its own malice, and didn't vanish when he turned away.

**19: Always:** "Like me?" the child asked innocently, taking his hand in friendship; "Love me?" the teenager asked teasingly, catching him in an affectionate embrace; "Want me?" the adult asked mockingly, smirking over his shoulder at him; _yes,_ Matt answered freely, _always_.

**20: Cheating:** Kira dreamed, over and over again, that he was sitting at a table, playing poker with Mello, and Near, and another who was dealing the cards, and as he dreamed, he never remembered to look at the dealer, or realized that the man (who was he?) was stacking the deck against him…and time and again he awoke furious, the answer just evading him, all three faces lost.

**21: Sense:** "Don't be silly, L, give me that; you'll never get anything done holding it that way," Raito scolded him, snatching the brush from his companion's loose grip, and L's protest was cut off in a surprised but pleased purr.

**22: Sugar:** Matt and Mello snuck downstairs one night to raid the fridge, exerting every bit of stealth they could, and they still got caught—the fact that it was by L, who was doing the exact same thing, made it a bit irrelevant, though.

**23: Sludge:** "Ryuzaki," Raito said firmly as L balanced a spoon in the middle of his coffee and delightedly watched it stand on its own, supported by the former liquid, "that's disgusting."

**24: Ruthless:** It wasn't until a ten-year-old L fed the courts information that gave a man a death sentence that he realized that his guardian was somewhat afraid of him; he considered this as he considered all other information, and decided that it was not important.

**25: Experience:** "I find it extremely ironic," Raito smirked at L, "that you should be so innocent"—"I'm learning, Raito-kun," L replied breathlessly… "And I'm really, really not."

**26: Woken:** The first time the child woke from dreams into hysterics, Quillsh Wammy was fool enough to open the door abruptly, the light from the corridor assaulting the boy's eyes; the child shrieked all the louder and threw the first thing that came to hand.

**27: Possible:** _I could shoot him,_ Mello thought furiously, closer to his rival than he had been in years, _I could; No, you really can't_, another voice pointed out logically, sounding an awful lot like L.

**28: Far:** The plan had always been to befriend L, but Raito took it a few steps further than Kira had ever expected or intended to go.

**29: Awakening:** They thought that every trace of their innocence had been lost, that they had long since been turned from children into weapons, but it was for the one they loved, so they did it willingly, and would have done so much more; and then he died, and they found that they had been far more protected than they thought.

**30: Fan:** There was a sound to the main room of headquarters at night—the few noises that penetrated from outside, the fan whirring steadily, the hum of computers, the irregular tap of computer keys, fabric against skin as Ryuzaki shifted—and Raito was all too familiar with it, as L regularly forgot that his companion needed sleep.

**31: Puzzle:** _No one understands me,_ the child thought bitterly, curled into himself defensively, _and if I have any power, no one ever will!_

**32: Interference:** If the task force had just _let them fight_, there ironically would have been a lot fewer brawls.

**33: Suicide:** L worked himself to exhaustion, over and over again, and more than once collapsed in a dead faint from lack of sleep and proper nutrition; for a very long time, Watari believed that L would inadvertently kill himself before any enemy got near enough to do it.

**34: Fear:** "I've been ready to die since I had the oh-so-bright idea to blow up a building I was standing in, so, no, I guess I'm not afraid to do this…but Matt…I'm scared for you," Mello admitted, hiding his face in his lover's shoulder, and Matt held him close and hoped that things would go their way for once.

**35: Obvious:** The boy could have been wearing a shirt that said _Kira_, it was so clear; L found it infuriating that he was prevented from proving it at every turn, and that Kira himself seemed unaware of it.

**36: Secret:** "No one can get into the Lair except L; he's done something clever to it," Mello glumly told a newcomer who'd tried to open That Door and failed, "but go ahead and try—everyone else has."

**37: Persistent:** Meeting his enemy's eyes with a smile, Kira was suddenly struck with the absolute conviction that _he knows!_ and he was walking into an intricate trap; the feeling did not die with L.

**38: Futile:** _No matter what you do, Kira, I remain Justice, and you are nothing but Destruction; kill me, and my children will become Vengeance in my name._

**39: Belated:** "L, child," Watari exclaimed in horror as the child touched spindly fingers to his own hollow cheek in obvious bemusement, "are you crying?"

**40: Sequence:** Kira wondered, later, how much of what had happened L had known, how much he had improvised, and how much he had orchestrated himself, but it was too late to ask.

**41: Substitute:** Matt took up smoking, in those years they were separated, because Mello was gone; after all, something had to kill him, and he tried to tell himself that one poison would do the job as well as another.

**42: Deep:** Raito couldn't shake the feeling that those eyes could look into his heart and soul, and wondered what they saw there that he didn't even know about himself.

**43: Ludicrous:** Mello tried to tell himself he had hated the place, and that he was glad to leave, but one of the memories he associated with 'home' was sprawling around on the floor back at Wammy's House, having a perfectly reasonable conversation with L about zombies, and cookies, and the relative pros and cons of socialism, and what he was going to do to Matt for putting black hair dye in his shampoo when he hadn't been paying attention.

**44: Pale:** The child had never been the picture of health, but as case followed case and L spent an increasing amount of time behind a computer screen, he acquired that peculiar shade of pallor common to computer programmers and vampires.

**45: Gratitude:** "Here," Raito grumbled, shoving a complicated assortment of sweets across the table between them, "it was a gift but I don't want it," and L mentally translated it into _this is for you, but I can't say so in public_ and reminded himself to thank him properly later.

**46: Silence:** Near looked away, and spoke harshly, and stayed still, and wondered if anyone else could hear his heart breaking, only to find that no one could.

**47: Shower:** For someone who didn't like to be touched, L was remarkably sensual, putting some time into staying clean if not neat, Raito observed, and then mentally chastised himself for putting so much thought into it.

**48: Useful:** Quillsh Wammy saw no reason to stop inventing things just because he was working for a precocious little child-detective, but it was a while before he realized almost everything he'd come up with recently was essentially a toy for the little one to use.

**49: Gone: **L didn't want to accept the existence of Shinigami, but the concept of the eyes and their powers evoked unwelcome memories, and he wondered…

**50: Truth:** When they were alone, Raito always called him _L_; Ryuzaki was a construct, a façade for other people, but L was who he really was—a creature of secrets, hidden.


	7. Shadow

**Ficlet Seven: Shadow**

**Note:** Sequel to 'Echo', follows DIRECTLY on.

**Author's Note:** So, this isn't the story I promised Kokoro-kun and LittleBrick—namely L's first meeting with Mello. There is a very good reason for this, namely: "WHAT STORY?" I have, in all honesty, _no_ idea what I'm doing for that one. (But Mello _is_ in this story, because he's _fun_, and he must have been a hell of a kid, and Kokoro-kun, I found the _cutest_ picture…) B is, too, which I honestly didn't expect. He just appeared. Also, this popped into my head about five seconds after I submitted 'Echo', and needed writing.

**Disclaimer:** More Things Le'letha Doesn't Own, Part LXXXVIII (At Least): _Death Note… _anyone within… _Another Note_… anyone within _that_… sign language… airports… Emergency Lollipops (really)… leopards… Skittles… the United States… England… anything…

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

What had begun as a weekend trip to the States had turned into a two-week stay in and around another orphanage.

Mr. Wammy paused outside the upstairs playroom door and considered knocking, not wanting to interrupt his charge's work. He had made the mistake, ten days ago, of opening the door unannounced and calling out to L directly.

L had snapped at him to 'get out and don't bother us again', and turned to comforting the little boy he was working with. Thus, his current hesitation. L, annoyed, was a rare but threatening creature.

His internal debate was interrupted by his young charge's voice from inside. "It's open, Mr. Wammy. Come in."

He edged open the door, stepping into an almost completely dark and certainly completely cluttered room, and almost instantly regretted it, as one foot made contact with something that skittered out of sight among the other objects scattered around the room.

"I'm not intruding?" he inquired softly.

"No," L replied. "He's asleep. Please close the door—and do not turn the lights on; they will burn my eyes as well."

Watari snatched his hand away from the light switch and cursed L's night vision and predictive powers alternately. Aloud, he covered his annoyance with an inquiry about the child's health.

If he squinted, he could almost make out L's customary too-large white shirt and pale skin—more tennis, Watari prescribed, and made a mental note—amid the gloom as the teen mulled the question over. "Better," he said finally. "Yes, it is taking awhile. Please take into account that I am working with a completely new language here."

Definitely cursing the predictive powers. It was _creepy_ the way he answered questions that hadn't been asked. "L, you've learnt spoken languages in less time than this."

"Yes, but spoken languages follow logic; I am learning my way through the mind of a child who does not think in the same way as most people," the teenaged detective pointed out from wherever he was.

"True. You know, I can't even see you. Admittedly this is nothing new, but we _are_ in the same room. Can you come over here to talk to me, or has the sheer amount of things on the floor defeated even your memory?"

L's voice was annoyingly placid—Watari _knew_ he did it on purpose. "No, I cannot. It is unrelated to the state of the carpet. Near is asleep on my lap. I do not think he will react well to being awoken."

"Accepted." Watari wished he could see that. For L to have abandoned his normal crouch in a place _not_ Wammy's House—where he was relatively comfortable—was a rare incidence, and only emphasized the amount of interest he was showing in this little boy. "But to return to the original topic—you can communicate with him?"

"Mr. Wammy," —_that_ was annoyance—"I could communicate with Near within hours of meeting him. It is agreeing on a common language that has consumed my time."

He had long since gotten over not understanding a lot of what the brilliant little boy was saying. It was better now than when he'd been confronted with an eight-year-old smart enough to turn him inside out and fry him. "Sorry?"

"We have agreed on a basic sign language that we can use to communicate while traveling. Mr. Wammy, Near has not left this place for a very long time. He has, as far as I have been able to determine due to the room for interpretation integral to his language, very little memory of anything else. Bringing him successfully to England will be problematic at best."

As best as possible for not being able to move, Quillsh Wammy made himself comfortable. L was in a lecturing mood. Being cut off from all but his most important cases had deprived him of anyone to boss around and impress with his intelligence.

Perhaps hearing the movement—or maybe he _could_ see—L continued, "You are fully aware how much I dislike the noise and close proximity of other people involved in any form of travel. Near is even more underexposed than I am. He will be extremely frightened. Until now, he has only been able to articulate his thoughts in the form of toys."

Watari couldn't help it. He interrupted. "Can he speak?"

"Can but won't; has had no need to," L replied promptly in staccato form. He'd been waiting for that question, so it didn't impede his lecture. "We have been working together to construct a sign language that can be used between us without the use of physical media. You are aware of the state of this room. Everything was required for a relatively simple discussion. The sign language is rudimentary at best, but evolving gradually."

"Can I learn it?"

L stifled the urge to be defensive. "Not easily."

"He's going to be afraid, you said," Mr. Wammy repeated, already planning the logistics of the trip in his head. So, L's dislike of crowds and too-loud noises, multiplied by a factor of…ten, why not…and a child…

"Yes. However, he trusts me."

"So you'll stay with him and talk to him to distract him."

"Essentially," L said happily.

The little one was going to be a nervous _wreck_ by the time they got back. "The fewer flights we change the better, then?"

"Yes. Once we're on the plane, he should be fine, since the amount of stimulation, when compared with moving through an airport, will be decreased."

He could make it two flights minimum—three airports, including Heathrow… "If you have a date when you two will be ready to go, I can prepare our trip back," he suggested. There were a thousand and one things that needed doing, and he was surprised L hadn't already tired of this and gone back to his cases.

L picked this moment to be annoying again. "We _are_ prepared. I was waiting for you."

Deep breath…don't snap at him…he either thinks it's funny or gets annoyed…either way, he wins…

* * *

Waiting for their plane to come into the New York airport, Watari allowed himself a moment to relax. The trip, so far, had gone fairly smoothly. L had spent a large amount of time talking to the boy beforehand in the hotel, fingers flickering, hands gesturing, and occasionally reverting to a skeleton supply of toys. The little one—Near, he reminded himself, although he still had no idea why L had dubbed him that—had replied in the same style.

Near hadn't even looked at him once.

But he hadn't broken down and started crying, either, and that was always a plus with small children.

At the moment, they were in a private lounge, with the door locked. The boy was curled up in a chair (that, honestly, dwarfed him) playing with a handful of tiny figures that had been part of their carry-on luggage. In the very next chair over, L was sucking on an Emergency Lollipop—they didn't melt, they didn't go bad, and several could be kept in various pockets; Watari wanted to find the man who had invented them and shake his hand—and looking in the direction of the window, mentally a million miles away. In total—the teen was likely to be thinking about several things at once.

So far, Watari had figured out maybe five signs they used on a regular basis, beyond the basics like "me" (double tap to the center of the chest—touching the other for "you"). Some of it appeared to be based off American Sign Language—now when had L learned that? A bit more seemed to come from the British version, which was totally different. Most, however, had been dredged up out of their respective heads. One common gesture in a sequence had eluded him until he matched it with L's explanation back in North Dakota—it added up to _L, I'm scared; L, I'm scared_.

It deeply amused him that L appeared to be enjoying 'mommying' the boy, distaste for touch seemingly abandoned. And they were interacting, that was good, agreeing on additions to their vocabulary—Near had invented something for 'lollipop' earlier, making L smile. The isolated space of the small lounge was apparently a low enough level of stimulation for the child; anywhere else, he'd either kept his eyes closed or buried them in L's shirt.

L had ended up carrying the boy everywhere. It didn't seem to be bothering him—after all, he was frequently jumped on and demanded to be held back at the House by…oh.

Oh, _this_ was going to be fun. Had L, the isolated orphan child, even _heard_ of sibling rivalry?

* * *

As the black car covered the last few meters to Wammy's House, Watari checked the auxiliary rearview mirror for what felt like the thousandth time. Quite apart from his normal surveillance to assure that they weren't being followed, he'd angled a second mirror to keep an eye on the children in the backseat.

L was occupying most of the bench, sprawled on his stomach and typing furiously at a laptop, bare feet hovering around the window. (Watari had resisted the urge to tell him off for getting footprints on the glass, simply because the little detective probably wouldn't have noticed and definitely wouldn't care.) The battery had beeped at him a while back, and he'd glared at it balefully before connecting it to something on the floor. The beeping had stopped. The typing had not.

Near had dealt with the overload of input from the constantly changing landscape outside by keeping his eyes closed, tightly clutching the ragged leopard he'd replaced a robot with, probably because it was easier to squeeze. Being three years old, he'd fallen asleep at some point.

He stopped the car completely before turning around and calling softly, "L… L, we're back."

For a moment, there was no response, and then L snapped out of whatever trance state he'd been in to commune with the computer, shoveled his hair out of his eyes, and looked at his guardian patronizingly, as if to say that _yes,_ he knew that.

"No," Watari retorted, leveling a finger at the look in general. The look was transferred exclusively to the offending digit, and the man retracted it almost immediately.

Attempting to regain his dignity, Watari continued, "The child is, since he will not look at me, still your responsibility. I called Roger earlier, and he has prepared a room in the south hall for Near. Take him inside."

"'m going," L agreed, shutting off his laptop and grabbing a handful of Skittles at the same time.

* * *

"We're going inside," L murmured softly to Near, even though he was fairly sure the pale boy was asleep. "Just inside." Well accustomed by now to carrying the little one, he set off up the stairs. It wouldn't be long before their arrival was noticed—had probably already been noticed, depending on how much the others were paying attention to the security cameras—and he'd really like to get Near somewhere quiet where he could accustom himself to his new location before he was forced to interact with anyone.

They wouldn't let him stay inside himself here.

"L!"

It wasn't who he'd been _expecting_, but it was someone much more welcome, albeit louder.

"L, you're back! Who's _that?_"

"Good afternoon, Mello," L solemnly greeted the little blond boy clinging to one leg of his ratty jeans. "I am glad to see you again. Please do not wake him up."

"Why not? I didn't know someone new was coming. Where'd you go? Why'd you bring back a kid?"

L kept moving, Mello in tow. "I did not fully expect to find him. Roger was told. His name is Near. And it is rude to wake people up if it is unnecessary."

"Oh." Mello thought about this for maybe three steps. "What if it's funny?"

"That too," L granted with perfect gravity.

Wordlessly, Mello tugged on his fistful of denim, reaching up with his other hand in a habitual demand to be picked up and held.

"My hands are full, Mello," L pointed out.

"But—" the blond retorted, renewing his plea. "L, c'mon! Please? Put him down! I want—"

L considered the situation. It would be awkward to hold two children at once, especially since Mello, at five, was at the far end of the 'growing out of toddler-hood' phase. Rearranging his grip might awaken Near, which he did not wish to happen, and almost definitely cause Near's toy leopard to fall from where it was wedged between the two of them, which would probably cause problems later. However, denying Mello something he wanted was a bad idea, because the blond still believed that volume was a reasonable route to success.

It could be argued that such was an even more pressing reason to deny him his request, but L had always been somewhat fond of him.

"I must bring Near to his room first, and _then_ I will carry you, if you still wish it," L told him firmly. "It would be extremely difficult to carry both of you at once, especially as one is still asleep."

Mello's face settled into what was, definitely, a pout.

And Near chose that moment to wake up, stirring against L's shoulder and renewing his grip on the shirt with one hand. With the other, he sleepily asked, _L, where-me?_

"I cannot reply in kind, Near, but we are at the school I promised you."

"Hey!" Mello piped up. "I didn't hear anything. What'd he say? Doesn't he talk?"

"At the moment," L filled him in, "Near does not like to use spoken words. We have been using a basic sign language. He asked where we were."

"Oh. How do I say hello?"

Actually, it had never been an issue. "You could wave."

Mello did so, with childish dignity, and L was pleased to see that Near actually paid attention. Sort of. "Now how do I tell him to walk on his own so you can carry me instead?" So much for dignity.

"You don't," L told him sharply. "For one thing, the vocabulary doesn't cover it. For another, Mello, be _patient_."

"'m trying," Mello muttered. "'s not working out."

_L,_ Near tapped the elder's skin for attention, _what-this?_ Pointing languidly at Mello.

"He wants to know your name, Mello."

_How-called?_ It was a standard question, asking for a new sign for a new thing or idea. And now, apparently, a person.

"I'll show you both in a minute…" L trailed off, and had to force himself not to stop moving defensively, spine tingling.

He traced the feeling instantly to a staircase they were passing, and, more exactly, to the dark-haired boy at the top of the stairs, who was leaning—no, crouched—over the rail, _staring_ at them.

L didn't even think about pulling Near closer, or changing direction slightly so that he was between B's stare and Mello. He was surprised to find that his lips had curled back in a primitive snarl.

He was loath to admit it even to himself, but his doppelganger disturbed him.

He knew the precise instant B's attention shifted from L to the little boys surrounding him, because protective instincts he didn't know he _had_ went into overdrive.

B he could deal with. B looking at the little ones with that _glare,_ full of resentment and jealousy and loathing, he didn't want to.

Black met red for a confrontational second, and they were past—B made no effort to follow, and L was glad.

"He only acts like that when you're around," Mello said, somewhat subdued. "I don't know why."

L thought frantically for a second, abbreviating the complicated struggle going on between the two of them. "He thinks he owns me, Mello," he said with a sigh. "He doesn't like to see me paying attention to anyone else."

"But you pay attention to everyone!" Mello protested, still tugging on L's jeans intermittently, as if repetition would change the fact that L simply didn't have that many hands. "It's what you _do!_"

_L scared? L scared?_ Near asked.

He answered both at once, shaking his head for Near and replying to Mello aloud. "Yes, but please don't tell him that. He'll figure it out eventually." _Hopefully before he runs off, or we'll have problems._ Next to L, who really, _really_ didn't count, B was the oldest child currently at the orphanage, part of the original generation inhabiting Wammy's House—a grand total of three; he'd been one of two found to give a young L some sort of socialization. With one child dead and the remaining two at odds, it could conclusively be labeled 'failed'. It was only a matter of time before he tired of the place.

"L, _please?_"

"Mello, repeating a request continuously will not change my answer," L tried not to snap.

The blond shot him a stare to beat all kicked-puppy stares before deciding to blame Near, and eyeballing him hostilely instead.

"This room has been newly cleaned out," L observed, opening a door he remembered as being previously unused.

"Good, it's his, _puttimdown_, L!"

L glared remonstratively at Mello, then sat down on the bed and attempted to engage Near in conversation, or, at least, listening.

_How-called?_ Near asked again, reminding him.

"Mello," L requested, "give me your hand, and I'll show you how to tell Near your name."

"He's heard you say it," Mello snapped back, tucking his hands into his armpits. "I don't want to talk to him."

"_Mello_."

"Oh, all right," the blond sighed, and extended one hand with the attitude that he was doing everyone in the room a favor.

"Thank you." _Near, this-M-E-L-L-O._ The letters they used came from American Sign Language, and L pretended not to see Mello taking note of the unfamiliar shapes L moved his fingers into.

Introductions complete, L briefly explained—or, rather, refreshed, as they'd gone over this before—that this was going to be Near's room.

Near nodded and closed his eyes, cutting himself off, whereupon Mello judged the silent dialogue over and leapt at L for a hug. L caught him in midair to prevent bodily damage.

"You're not carrying any sugar," Mello observed, and it was true. "Let's go find some."

Dark eyes popped back open as L stood up, again with a child in his arms.

_L go?! L no-go!_ Near signed wildly and repeatedly, eyes wide and terrified.

"I'll come back," L reassured him—Near did not look reassured. "I _promise_, Near."

Near clung to the battered leopard and closed his eyes tightly again. _L-L-L-L-L back no-go L me-me-me-me L scared_…

Sighing, L put Mello back down, creating a grand total of two tantrum-throwing children in the room. Postponing dealing with Mello temporarily, he turned to comforting the more fragile of the two.

"Near, I'm coming back—" he accompanied his words with the appropriate gestures "really, I am. We're just leaving for a few minutes, because I'm hungry."

…_lollipop…_Near signed in between the other panicked gestures.

"Exactly."

_L no-go._

"Just for now."

_L come back._

"Right." And, aside, "Mello, hush."

_L come back yes._

L repeated the gesture verbatim.

_Yes-yes-yes,_ Near said, and returned to crushing his leopard.

Disaster averted, L dealt with the next one by speaking nine words, namely, "Come on, Mello, let's go find something to eat," picking the blond child up, and leaving quietly, closing the door behind him.

"Don't go back," Mello grumbled mutinously, voice slightly muffled by L's shirt and his own scowl.

"I promised I would, Mello, and he can't just be left alone."

"You'll still talk to me?"

"Of course."

"But you'll be busy."

"I'm always busy."

"'spose," Mello agreed reluctantly, and had to be placated with chocolate.

"L?" he said with his mouth full.

L gave him an inquisitive look.

"I don't like him."

L sighed.

* * *

**Author's ****Extra Note:** Yes, I do think this is how the rivalry started—fighting over L personally before they even began fighting over their respective rights to inherit. (Also, they just cheese each other off.) My mother used to use basic sign language at the daycare she ran for several years, and I've picked up the general buzz that baby-sign is enjoying a revival. Of course, I may be wrong, and I may in fact be picking up epsilon-rays from the planet Barcelona (laughs) but I sort of doubt it.

**Side Note:** Near says, in the _Death Note_ bonus chapter, that he never met, saw, or spoke to L. THE BRAT IS **LYING**. FLAT-OUT LYING. I have logical proof. Namely, if he never saw L, how did he know how to make the mask, or that little finger puppet—that, by the way, he keeps? L, as we all know, was darn _paranoid_ about pictures and other people knowing what he looked like. I hate having holes kicked in my theories and stories, so I'm kicking back. (Also, I just like pictures and/or stories of L, Mello, Matt, and Near pretending to be the most dysfunctional family since the Addams clan went off the air.) I _did_, however, appreciate the ratification of the theory that L picked his successors for the ability to be evil bastards. (In my book, that's a technical term.)

**Also:** Anyone else think we need a series totally devoted to the Wammy's House kids, including L, B, and the mysterious A? I mean, come on—there's so much we aren't told, and they are So Much Fun! Based on how much fanfiction there is on the topic, I think if we got every fan to contribute a dollar (or equivalent), we could pay the author, artist, and assorted people associated with publishing and still have money to burn. Three or four manga volumes, that's all I ask.

OK, I'm done ranting. Thanks.


	8. Brat Prince

**Ficlet Eight:** **Brat Prince**

**Author's Note:** This is another of those stories that came to me on the bus to school. I knocked it around a bit in my head and ran it past Kokoro-kun, and it never came to anything until now. It's slightly far-fetched and more than a bit ridiculous. But I wanted to write it.

**Disclaimer:** I disclaim the title of this story. It does not belong to me, nor does the original bearer of the title 'brat prince' have _anything_ to do with this story. (God Forbid.) I also don't own L; any original characters (AKA, the rest of the cast) are of my own invention.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

Grace Anderson, Ph. D, was delighted to get the call from her old friend Sean Wellmar. Having built up a successful psychological practice only to pass it off in order to retire briefly and take some well-earned rest, she had underestimated just how dull 'rest' actually was, when you got right down to it. Unwilling to admit defeat in her attempt at relaxation, she had still balked at returning to the daily grind of active practice.

She was perfectly happy, then, to take up child psychology under the authority of an old family friend, whom, she had heard, had taken on the directorship of a British orphanage. Fancying a change of weather from southern Georgia, she looked into renting an apartment and crossed the Atlantic for a couple of years. It didn't take her long to get settled in, and she took a week and a half to learn her way around her new hometown before driving to her latest job.

Arriving early on a Wednesday, she was met literally at the door by Sean, who was still definitely the family friend who had taken her to movies and playscapes when her father hadn't had the time, but was looking a little run down.

"Grace, you're looking well!" he greeted her with a smile and a slap on the back.

"You too, Uncle Sean." Although they weren't actually related, she had fallen into the habit of calling him that as a child, as he was around so often. "So, shall I get right to work, or are you going to give me the tour?"

He did take time out of his day to escort her around campus, familiarize her with the indoor layout, and brief her on the kids' daily schedules, which quite consumed the morning. After lunch, they went over the files that the last resident counselor had left.

Grace eyed the file cabinet with a look of disgust. "Why don't you tell me the high points so I know what to look for? That way I won't just have to start with 'A' and read everything."

Wellmar snorted as if he wished _he_ had someone to give him the short version, but obliged, listing a few names and adding brief descriptions of what he'd been told.

"Ok," Grace muttered, making notes on a legal pad she'd found. "That doesn't sound too bad—come to think of it, Uncle Sean, why are you suddenly looking for a counselor? Did the last one get married, or something?" That had happened at her office, and she'd spent a week alternately cursing the girl for dumping her patients without any warning and empathizing over the chaos of wedding plans, depending on who was listening.

"Ah," said Wellmar. "You see…no."

"I thought that list sounded too good to be true," Grace scolded. "There's always one or two real hard cases, aren't there?"

Wellmar actually covered his face and sighed. "Oh God. You have no idea. Tim Kiger claimed that if he didn't get out, he'd…what was it he said? Oh yes—'someone will get shot. It might be me, but it'll probably be him.' Strictly off the record, of course, and he was _very_ drunk. But I don't blame him."

Grace leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and gave him her best un-amused-parent stare. "Start talking."

Wellmar heaved another sigh. "The operative words are probably 'unholy terror'."

"Name?" Against her will, Grace found herself reaching for the filing cabinet.

"See, that's the thing. No one really knows. The paperwork was muddled when he was transferred here—when we called the other place and asked, they said it was just as messed up when they had him. He'll answer to L."

"L?" Grace inquired skeptically. "Just an initial?"

"_When_ he answers," Wellmar specified. "_When _anyone works up the courage to deal with him."

"Violent?"

"No. Worse. Smart."

"Smart."

"Impossibly so. Let me give you an example." Wellmar took his face out of his hands and extended them to her as if his example were written on his palms. "Tim was scared silly of him because—get this—he claimed that the child could read his mind."

"This Kiger needs some help of his own," Grace inserted sarcastically.

"No, really. L would say things in chorus with him—unprompted. I heard it myself. Very creepy."

"Things…like catchphrases? Common sentences?"

"Full sentences. When I finally got a straight answer out of him—which took a while—he said that Kiger should strive to be less predictable."

"That sounds like a quote," Grace noted.

"It is."

"How old is this kid 'L'?" She was betting on ten, eleven maybe. Children younger than that didn't use words like 'strive'.

Wellmar looked her straight in the eye. "He's six. Until last year, we thought he was dumb in every sense of the word, because he never spoke, didn't react to things, and slept through the day if given half the chance. Then we had a really bad thunderstorm that took out the power. The children panicked, so we had to take roll, and we found out that there was one child missing—L, of course. It took us an hour and a half to find him: he was reading some adult novel by flashlight in the library. Since the main lights were off, he hadn't even _noticed_ the blackout."

She was now almost sure that Uncle Sean was pulling a harmless prank on her, so Grace played along: "Seems I've got to meet him. Where do you think I can find him around now?"

"Well, you know the study I said was kept unused except for impressing possible donors?"

"Yes. Why would he be there?"

"He likes the other children about as much as they like him. Since we don't use it, he lives in there mostly. Reading."

If Grace had bet on her assumption that Wellmar was making this impossible kid up, she would have lost the money. When they had left the counselor's office and gone down to the second floor where the study was, Wellmar stood aside and beckoned her in with a sardonic smile and a "Try not to lose your temper."

"Hello?" Grace called as the door closed behind her. Surveying the room, she took in the wall-to-wall bookshelves stuffed with classics, nonfiction, reference texts, and a scattering of modern novels; the comfortable chairs; the desk; the fireplace with adjacent rug; and, under her feet, what resembled the debris of a preteen Hallowe'en party.

"Anyone home? I'm Grace." There were books on the floor, stacked haphazardly. One or two had been left open. Pieces of paper held places in others. There were also newspapers littering the floor, along with one or two magazines.

The child in the chair made no move to answer her, nor even acknowledge her presence.

Trying to avoid staring directly, Grace noted her impressions: small, scrawny, overlong black hair that hadn't seen scissors or brush in a while; a shirt too big for him, bearing faint stains of chocolate, perhaps icing.

There was a large book propped up against his knees, which were drawn up onto the chair. He didn't take his eyes off it to look up and notice her.

"Can I see what you're reading? Is it interesting?"

No answer.

Grace tried a few more questions, trying to find something he'd respond to. As it turned out, the common ground was annoyance.

"You," the child said, in perfect, clipped British English, "are interfering with my enjoyment of this book. Go away."

No, six-year-olds didn't talk like that—at least, they didn't use that level of vocabulary. It was made all the more surreal by the fact that the boy had the remains of a preschool lisp, which she thought he was trying very hard to correct for. "No. How old are you?"

"Six. Go away."

"What part of no didn't you understand?"

"The declarative negative."

"Someone so intelligent shouldn't be so rude," she told him, offended despite herself. She'd been spit at and kicked. She'd been sworn at by hulking, surly teenagers. She had kept her cool regardless.

This brilliant little devil child had totally infuriated her in four sentences and a word.

"And I'm not going to stand here and be insulted," she finished.

Grace had turned on her heel and stormed towards the door before realizing that she was doing exactly what he wanted her to, and had therefore lost. She reversed her steps.

"The door is in the other direction," L informed her, still reading.

"Why," Grace demanded, "does anyone put up with you?"

"They don't," L replied coolly, meeting her gaze for the first time. He had very large, matte black eyes. "They have more sense than to bother me."

There was absolutely no way to reply to that. She had lost this one. Badly.

"Told you," Wellmar said glumly as she turned around to give the far side of the door a poisonous glare.

* * *

"He's a _nightmare!_" Grace shouted a week later, ten minutes after storming out of the fourth fruitless effort to get any sort of cooperative response out of him. "Why hasn't something been _done_?"

Wellmar eyed the jar of pens readily available on her desk—whether he was worried about her knocking them over or throwing at him was debatable. "Like what, Grace? I hope you have some ideas, because _we_ haven't found anything that works."

"Well, for starters, why doesn't he go to class?"

"Because," Wellmar replied patiently, with a growing tinge of sarcasm, "last time I saw him, he was reading a collection of annotated Rudyard Kipling essays. The time before that, it was the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Before _that_, I think it was something about Oliver Cromwell. Do you really think it's a good idea to put him in a class of five and six year olds learning to write legibly and play with papier-mâché?"

Grace actually couldn't argue with that. "It wouldn't hold the intellectual stimulation, of course, but he's completely maladjusted socially. He _can't_ exist separately from the rest of humanity like he does now."

"He's only little, Grace—"

"And learning very, very fast. We've got to at least get him interacting with other kids. Older children, maybe."

Wellmar shrugged helplessly. "What do you suggest?"

"Getting him out of that room, to begin with. Does he come out at all? I haven't seen him."

"I imagine he's avoiding you," Wellmar pointed out dryly. "Apparently he drags himself away from his books to eat occasionally. I talked to Nancy Holland—you know, the woman in charge of the cafeteria? Her people think he's cute, so they feed him whenever he shows up."

"Oh, _that's_ where he gets the sweets."

"I assume so."

Grace thought for a moment. "What if you actually needed to use that study?"

Shrugging, Wellmar answered, "He'd just creep back in when the visitors were gone."

"Getting him out is the first step," Grace dismissed this, waving her hands as if she could swat all her problems away. "Let's tell him we need the room—get him to stay in one of the single rooms. Maybe he'd feel less out of place in one of the older classes?"

With a shrug, Wellmar agreed to give the idea a try.

* * *

It failed.

Miserably.

In fact, it never even got off the runway.

It just sort of exploded in the hangar.

"L, we need to use this room," Grace told him, standing in the doorway of the study-cum-lair. "We have visitors coming next week."

The boy looked up from a ragged notebook that he'd been scribbling in. Books lay open all around him on the rug. "Since when?"

"It's been planned for days. Come on. Grab some books—we've got a room set up so you won't have to bunk with anyone."

"You wouldn't subject anyone else to that," L said drolly, and Grace barely stifled the impulse to jump and gasp—she'd been thinking the exact same thing. She suddenly had a lot more respect for the departed Tim Kiger.

"And no," he added.

"What do you mean, no?" Grace exclaimed, off balance.

"We've had this conversation before," he noted. "It means you're lying."

"About what?"

"The visit." Said in a tone indicating _of-course_. "There's no such thing."

"And how would you know that?" she demanded.

With a long-suffering sigh, made all the more eerie for the childish pitch, L closed his notebook and trotted over to the bookshelves. Shoving the sliding ladder over a bit, he climbed up several steps fearlessly—Grace made an abortive move to stop him—and retrieved a folded piece of paper from where it had been stashed between books.

When he'd gotten back down, paper tightly clenched in one little hand, he clambered onto the broad desk by way of the adjacent chair and unfolded the paper with all the concentration of a magician performing his latest trick.

Grace's eyes nearly fell out of her head when she realized it was a copy, painstakingly reproduced in the odd, printed-looking characters that she'd seen L use, of the master calendar in Sean Wellmar's office. Scanning the daily blocks, she spotted a note that had been added, she _knew_, only last night.

"This is from the director's office! How did you get this?" she cried, cursing herself for not backing up the lie—and for digging her own grave by saying that the mythical visit had been planned for a while.

"I have a key, of course," L replied coolly, dark eyes mocking her. "And a book on lock picking. And one on alarm systems."

Grace gritted her teeth and resisted the temptation to knock the arrogance right out of him as he added, "And I learn very, very quickly."

* * *

"Did you lose a key to your office recently?" Grace demanded of Director Wellmar when she had calmed down enough to speak.

He thought for a moment. "Why, yes I did," he recalled. "I knocked it into the radiator by accident. I figured the work crews would get it out when they checked the system before winter. Why? Oh—don't tell me…the brat has it."

"Little fingers," Grace muttered, and it sounded like a curse. "Little fingers and insatiable curiosity. I'd get that lock changed, if I were you. My God—I bet he's into all the files. Doesn't the kid sleep?" she demanded of no one.

"Surely he must," Wellmar answered anyway.

Grace paused and considered. "Maybe that's it."

"What is?"

"Well, how hard can it be to pick up and move one sleeping little kid? You said the serving staff feed him—can you talk them into dosing whatever they give him with that medicine—" She clicked her fingers, thinking—"the one that always sends kids to sleep?"

"Grace! We're not going to drug a child just because he's being a little brat!"

"It's perfectly harmless…parents use it all the time."

Wellmar folded his arms. "Grace, you're a professional; you can't suggest things like that. What is it about this kid that's gotten you so riled up?"

She bit her lip and glared at a wall. "He scares me," she admitted. "If he were a teenager mouthing off and breaking into confidential files like this, it would be one thing. But he's so little—and it's eerie."

The director resisted the temptation to pat her on the shoulder. "I would dearly like to see him act a little more normally. Why don't we just skip the medicine and move him out anyway?"

Grace shrugged. "All right. But you'll need to have someone on hand to change the locks to something more secure."

"I can do that."

* * *

Four days later, at three in the morning, Grace shifted uncomfortably outside L's commandeered room. She was accompanied by one of the night hall monitors—Reimart, a stocky young man—and a woman who worked in the kitchen. This last had been more than willing to talk to Grace when she had come calling about the boy.

"Poor baby," she had chipped in insincerely—she didn't feel sorry for the brat at all! "Sounds like he's up at all hours of the night."

"Oh, he is!" the woman—"Call me Susannah"—agreed. "I was in here at three in the morning setting up for breakfast one day, and he came wandering in. When I asked, he said he couldn't sleep, and was there any cake left?"

"Someone needs to make sure he sleeps from time to time," Grace had commented. "If you see him up that late again, will you remind him?"

Susannah frowned worriedly. "Oh, he doesn't listen."

She patted the other woman's hand. "I'm sure you'll think of something. It's not healthy."

Grace was fairly confident that the seed was planted, and that the woman had probably added something to the next snack she'd handed out to little L.

The hall monitor cracked open the door, shining a low-level torch around the room, keeping it low. "I don't see him," the man whispered after a minute.

"Doesn't he sleep in here?" Grace whispered back.

Reimart shrugged. "I've never come looking. He doesn't make trouble."

She managed not to laugh, but it was a close call. Only her reluctance to wake the child stopped her.

The man continued to move the torch's beam around, taking a few steps inside. Grace followed close behind, as did the woman. A few seconds later, the kitchen lady gasped quietly.

"Look," she whispered, pointing.

Grace followed Susannah's finger up the tall, deep bookcases that lined the walls to a shelf close to the top. Her mental picture of the room had that shelf marked as empty.

Right now it was not.

"What is he _doing_ up there?" the hall monitor demanded, carefully not pointing the torch at the sleeping boy. "Isn't he scared?"

Grace recalled L's fearless ascent of the ladder the day he'd shown her the pirated schedule. "I don't think he's scared of anything," she growled.

"Well, he's definitely asleep," she added. "Otherwise we'd be hearing about it by now."

"I'll get him," Reimart volunteered, handing the torch to Susannah. "Keep it low."

The bookcase ladder was a length away from where it needed to be—L had evidently scrambled, heedless of life and limb, across the shelves to get to the one he was currently snoozing on. Reimart put his hands on it and pushed it gently to the left.

That was when all hell broke loose.

Moving the ladder disturbed a connection. When the link was severed, it tripped the fire and burglar alarms, setting off two distinct, discordant sirens that screamed the length and breadth of the campus.

Unsurprisingly, it woke up everyone within five miles. Dogs barked, children screamed and cried in terror, teachers and supervisors shouted and ran around, phones rang off the hook—and that was before the respective emergency services showed up.

In the ensuing chaos, L had time to deconstruct his booby trap, hide the remnants, and make himself extremely scarce. When he ventured out to see the mayhem he'd unleashed, he also managed, although no one would find this out for a very long time, to steal a police radio out of one of the haphazardly parked cruisers that littered the driveway and lawn.

* * *

Three days later, everything had been sorted out and almost everyone had been pacified, with the exception of Grace, who could still see, in her mind's eye, the look on that little boy's face as Bedlam erupted around him. Black eyes wide in the darkness, light from the alarms reflecting off them, the child had been grinning with absolute delight, the fingers of one hand pressed against his mouth as if suppressing laughter.

"You did that," she snapped without ceremony, storming into L's den with a face like thunder.

He looked her straight in the eye at once. "You tried to drug me," he retorted. "Fair's fair."

"I never!" she cried.

"Not directly," the boy shrugged. "But you did."

"Ridiculous," Grace denied. "You can't prove that."

A little devil smile appeared on L's face. "Are you sure? Are you _absolutely_ sure?"

She wasn't. He must have seen in her eyes, because he went on, "Just leave me alone, Grace Anderson. Let me read, let me learn, don't bother me, and I'll be out of your hair soon enough."

Grace let out a sigh that was more like a hiss. "What in the world _are_ you, L?"

The boy put his head on one side, bird-like, and seemed to consider the question. For a moment, she thought she was actually going to get an answer. But then he said, "Bored," cheerfully, and went back to his book, unwrapping a peppermint almost absently.

* * *

They were _almost_ civil to each other for the next two years, until L vanished into intricate spider's webs of his own design amid genuine fire and smoke.

She never saw him again, of course.

* * *

**Author's Note:** L, by his very nature, must have been a little devil child… It is, of course, a ridiculous story. I had this image in my head of little L setting off a booby trap rigged into the fire alarm. In my mind's eye, he was sitting on high watching it all. So I gave him a bookshelf…mostly because I want one of those sliding ladder things. The last two sentences are based on that tidbit in "Another Note" that states that L met Quillsh Wammy at the age of 8, during a string of bombings in England that became his first major case. I actually don't own a copy of "Another Note", but that factoid stuck with me.

I've now finished my summer job. Hooray. I don't mind working with little kids—I enjoy it, on the whole, but I hate not being able to stay up until oh-dark-thirty, since that's when I write best. Thus why I've been fanfiction-dead recently.


	9. Liar Liar

**Ficlet Nine: Liar Liar**

**Warning: **_Liar Liar_ is much darker than anything else in this collection to date. It contains _major character death, violence, and slash_. I'm keeping the rating at T, because I simply don't have the guts to write an M-level fic.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Death Note, or any of the characters who appear in this story. I reserve the right to throw the word 'love' around in the affectionate usage of the word, though.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

"_The only way to kill a god of death…is to make them fall in love…" –Rem, Episode 12: Love_

Light looks away, he thinks, for no more than a moment, but when he looks back, L is gone. He's just vanished. A moment ago—wasn't it?—he was bent over the captured Death Note, staring at it with all the intensity he usually reserves for things like strawberries and background details on CC TV videos, and, truth be told, Light himself.

But now he's disappeared, and Light feels a twinge of worry. Not fear—he has the situation too well in hand to be afraid—but he does not want to underestimate his adversary. That would be foolish. He's reversed L's surveillance back on him, keeping track of the young detective as often as he physically can, lest L escape through some loophole created at the last minute. It could happen.

Turning to his computer, he accesses the internal camera feeds. Everyone else has left for the day; Light had assured his father that he would catch the bus home, and just wanted to stay for a few minutes to check up on the last few bits of data. (L had said nothing to this, part of his attention focused on the Yagami men while the thrust of his focus remained on the Death Note.)

Light pages through camera after camera, caught between cursing L's paranoia for installing so many cameras and expressing his reluctant respect for someone else willing to go to extremes. He spends several minutes staring at screens empty of any form of life before giving up and conceding that it is probably the easier course to just get up and look for the man.

Pushing the rolling chair away from the computer, he closes down the surveillance program and stalks past Rem, who is haunting the safe the Death Note is locked in, without a word or glance of acknowledgement. He wanders the hallways for a while, checking the kitchen, the car park, the bedroom the two youths so recently shared, and several bathrooms before heading upstairs to the roof. Light recalls seeing, at the end of the Higuchi debacle, L staring around at the phenomenal skyline visible from the roof where the helicopter had landed. He'd been trying to hide it, and mostly succeeding.

He realizes how flimsy this supposition is when he opens the door to the roof only to be confronted by a blast of wind and frigid rain. The year is growing older, and it's getting chilly. The weather is changing.

Light hadn't noticed before now. He's spent so much time inside that building, where windows are in short supply. Grimacing as the chill bites into him, he turns to close the door and head back inside, but stops.

Dimly visible through the dark and sheeting rain, he can see the flash of a white shirt.

Rolling his eyes privately, Light calls, "Ryuzaki? What are you doing out here? It's freezing!" He knows L hates the cold.

The young detective doesn't move, as if he hadn't heard. It is perfectly possible.

"Ryuzaki!" Light calls again, and upon getting no reply, he curses to himself and steps out onto the roof fully, letting the door swing closed behind him. He picks his way across the roof carefully—it will be awash soon, and is increasingly dangerous with each second either of them spends out here.

"Hey," he greets his _enemy? friend? rival?, _reaching out cautiously to catch him by the shoulder. Light restrains the impulse to throw L off balance—he is standing very close to the edge, and the view from whatever cameras must be up here cannot be of very good quality, impeded by pouring rain.

Instead, he pulls him back a little bit, repeating himself above the noise of the rain, "What are you doing out here?"

Dark eyes, still not watching him, blink a few times before turning to look at him. It's a slow gesture, as if L were moving through mud. He tips his head on one side to look up at Light questioningly.

"I am…" the young detective starts, then trails off as if losing his train of thought. "It's not important."

"It's got you out here in the rain and the cold," Light points out.

"Yes," L says softly, as if this is a revelation. "How long has it been raining?"

"How should I know that?" Light snaps involuntarily. "I just got out here! Don't tell me you didn't notice."

L says nothing, and it takes a moment for the younger to realize that this is in obedience to his request to not be told that L had not, indeed, noticed.

"Yeah, right," he snorts. "I don't believe that."

One shoulder—the one restrained, as if to make a point—lifts in a shrug, and the dark-haired man turns his face away, but makes no effort to move further.

Light releases a frustrated sigh, fed up with the infuriating, brilliant, contrary detective and the fact that _he's right about everything and I don't know how he knows_. _Soon,_ he comforts himself. _Not long now, and it'll all be over._

"It's almost over, isn't it," L says abruptly, still looking out over the city in the rain.

Startled, Light tightens his grip on the other man's shoulder, and he's reminded anew how very unhealthy L really is. Through the sodden white shirt, he imagines that he can see every bone in his ribs and spine. It's not far from the truth. His eyes are sunken too far back into his head. _How long has he been doing this?_ Light wonders, not about L's latest stunt of standing in the rain, but of his life in general.

"What do you mean?"

L turns, suddenly, away from the city below, which looks very remote now, cut off from them by the rain and the darkness. As Light loosens his grip on his shoulder, L brings his own long fingers up to replace it, brushing them over the spot where Light had touched him before placing both hands on the younger man's shoulders. With a deep, regretful sigh, he shifts so he can look Light straight in the eyes.

Caught by surprise, Light lets him do it. "Ryuzaki?"

"I wish…" L says, tapping one palm gently against the corresponding shoulder. "I wish…you understood."

"Understood what? What's wrong with you today?" Light is genuinely confused. A sliver of _worry_ bites into his stomach, along with a whisper: _he knows!_

The tapping palm leaves his shoulder, tracing down the line of his arm to take his hand while the other hand holds him in place determinedly. L wraps his long fingers around Light's, pulling him closer and taking advantage of the young man's confusion to tuck his head under Light's.

Completely involuntarily, Light's free hand slips around the young detective's too-thin waist. A flush of surprise at the peculiarly intimate embrace coloring his cheeks, Light demands, somewhat more quietly, to know what is going on. While he is not particularly embarrassed by the contact—they have played this game before, casually and offhandedly, neither meaning it to come to anything; and Light was the one, apparently, who introduced L to the concept of the restorative hug—it is unexpected. And more than slightly awkward, coming as it does from a man he expects to kill before the week is out.

"I wish you understood," L repeats, the whisper brushing against his throat not unpleasantly.

"So," he replies, "make me understand."

L's hands tighten, and a peculiar hitch, for just a moment, comes into his breathing. Locked together as they are, Light can feel it as if it was his own, and abruptly this little interlude becomes a lot more interesting. Something has scared L beyond all telling, something has hurt him that he cannot admit to. _Out here, alone, in the rain…are you crying, L? Do you even know how?_

"Will you let me speak, then?" L asks.

"I'm listening," Light whispers in his ear.

L sighs, and says nothing for a moment, resting against Light as if the other is the only thing in all the world holding him up. And then he begins, with "I know. No—shh!" For Light has twitched away from him, all ready to pass it off as offense instead of what it really is—fear—no, worry.

"I know," L repeats, alone, in the dark, hidden in the rain. "I knew, but I didn't know how—and then _you_ didn't know. Oh, that confused me, Light." The simple, unadorned name hints at the intimacy telegraphed by the embrace, the secrets.

"Oh…" he draws it out in a sigh, "how that confused me. And then, and then, and then, it was you, but it was _you_." He is making no sense, and he knows it. "Why did it have to be _you?_

"That sort of power, Light…the power to change things, yes? From life to death, order to chaos and chaos to order…to set the world aright."

Light draws breath to speak, to deny it all, despite the fact that nobody can hear them and nobody can see them and nobody ever will. L pulls back, just a bit, enough to meet his eyes and move his hand from Light's shoulder, a whisper-thin touch across his lips that silences him as sure as any gag or shout. Long fingers trace the lines of his face, down to his throat, where they brush gently against his pulse point before resting on the junction between neck and shoulder.

L's eyes are intense, holding Light's hypnotically. This is no game. If it is, it's a game of life and death, and no one leaves the ring alive. L's eyes are fearless, on fire. It's a fire that has sparked itself in Light's as well, and L will fan the flames for all he's worth.

"To make it _work_, Light, as it never has," L continues, whispering. In Light's ears, it's a shout, a shout that somehow overpowers the pulse of his blood in his ears, the breath scorching through his lungs.

"Can you imagine? That power, Light…I can turn the world upside down and hold it in the palm of my hand if I must, but so can you. Can't you, Light? Isn't it something?" Those dark eyes flare, and Light draws an audible breath helplessly. He has seen that look before—reflected in his computer screen at home, in the dying spark of the television turned off after a productive trawl through the news channels. It's the look in Light's own eyes; it's power.

They both know it, both tasted that. Light sees legitimacy, the ability to order directly and be obeyed without question—to dismiss those who are useless and use those who can be used; the authority wielded by the master puppeteer. L sees power, exhilaration, the ability to get things done where no one else can—the freedom of autonomy.

It is so tempting.

"You and I are so similar, Light," L breathes. "We could rule the world, either of us."

"How long have you been working to create a world of justice, L?" Light finally manages to speak through the fire burning inside him. A mocking question, but a real one. L has nothing to lose by speaking this way. _He knows…_

"You can do in days what takes me months," L admits, and it's honest. For just a little while, just for tonight, they can be honest—there is no one to see and no one to tell. They're alone, above the world, in the darkness.

"But," he goes on, fingers slipping behind Light's neck in a full embrace, "I can give you in weeks what will take you years."

"Power?" Light tests.

"Authority."

It's a devil's deal, and they know it. Light laughs, softly, a dark, humorless chuckle. "And what's to stop me taking all that myself?"

L smiles, as he only ever does when nothing's funny. It's slightly eerie. "It's not that simple, dear Light. You need me."

"Do I?"

The eerie smile stays. "Oh yes. You'll see."

Light is tempted, oh, so tempted. Freedom, power, the _world_, and _L_—all his, for a word, and a promise; a life spared, a world forged. L as _ally_, L as _his_.

He needs that.

And that's when, Light thinks, his new world really begins; in the rain, in the dark, hundreds of feet above Tokyo—with an embrace, and a bargain, and a kiss that seals it all and only intensifies the fire in his blood.

It's not a game anymore.

It's a victory.

* * *

They lay their plans in secret, with caution and with care.

"Rem…" Light muses openly, tapping a pencil back and forth as he thinks. It spins between his fingers, point and eraser striking the bed by turns. He's sprawled out on his stomach across the bed in their shared room, plotting—but with L, not against him now. "Rem will be a problem."

"How did you plan to deal with her?" L asks, curiously. "She protects Amane-san, yes?" Light confirms this, watching with amusement as L assembles puzzle pieces that he has no way of having. "So if I continued to pursue her, she would have killed me?"

"Yes. And Watari. And that would have gotten rid of her, too."

L puts one finger to his mouth and waits.

"Shinigami aren't allowed, technically," Light specifies, "to protect people."

"Gods of death exist to kill."

"Right. If they kill to save the life of someone they love, then they die too."

"Very neat." Light wonders how he could have missed this streak of bloodthirstiness emerging from his consort, before realizing that it normally emerged as indifference to any suffering his actions caused.

"So…" L bites at his thumb thoughtfully, free hand wrapped tightly around his legs. It's gone three in the morning, and L has filled the cameras and bugs that haunt even this room with reruns compiled from _weeks_ of records. They are off the air.

"Could you use the Death Note to control one of the task force, make them investigate Amane on their own?"

Light thinks it over. If he hadn't been saving Rem as his secret anti-L weapon, he might have done just that to get rid of the threatening Shinigami. "It should work."

"Then she'll kill whoever we send after her…can we do that? What happens if two Death Notes affect the same person? Wait—let me think about this."

Light waits. He has not, of course, told L everything about the Death Notes, but for someone working on limited information, the young detective is filling in the blanks very quickly.

"We know from the tapes Amane sent to Sakura TV that even if a death is scheduled for a later time, that person can be killed before by another Note. We know this because she chose petty criminals as examples, lest the original Kira" accompanied by a nod of acknowledgement at Light, who smirks "kill them first."

L's logic is sound, so Light agrees.

"Therefore if the time of death is set later, it is almost guaranteed that Rem will get to him first, thus precipitating her own demise."

"I like 'precipitating'," Light puts in.

L pauses for a few beats in what Light is _sure_ is either a sigh or a laugh. He has it narrowed down to one of those two, anyway. "Feasible?"

"I like that too. And yes. So who do we send?"

His consort dismisses that with a wave. "Details."

Light broaches the subject cautiously. "L…what about Watari? He knows you better than anyone—I'm surprised he hasn't noticed already."

"I've had a lot of practice lying to him, Light-kun," L snaps. "I know what I'm doing."

"But…" Light prompts him.

The dark-haired detective scowls, biting more forcefully at his thumb. Light resists the urge to snatch his hand away. "I already figured that out. I can drop out of sight at the same time."

Light abandons his pencil, dropping it on the floor. "I'm listening."

"We'll need to plan it out to the second—that you can set the time of death is essential. I will be the catalyst."

"You?"

"Yes. I am capable of faking my own death—a collapse, at least. If you keep everyone else away—send them running for ambulances and the like, they should be fooled. We then have instructions in the Death Note along the lines of 'takes his employer's body and drives away in car, before committing suicide in a way that ensures the body will not be found'. Presumably, I'll be able to escape the car and hide somewhere while the investigation collapses."

"And then we'll meet up afterwards?" Light finishes, disturbed. The instructions almost precisely mirror the strategy he used to dispose of Naomi Misora. But he has had no indication that L knows about that, so he says nothing.

"Exactly. I can give you the name, and you know his face perfectly well."

Light smiles, pulling himself up from his sprawl and moving to embrace L. "Perfect," he says, satisfied.

They manage to distract themselves for a while after that.

"Light?" L says later, nestled against his lover's body.

"Yeah?"

"Do you plan to bring back Misa? At all?"

The question makes him laugh before he actually thinks about it. "I'd just as soon not—she is quite irritating. But I need her Eyes, L. You have no idea how useful that is."

"I think I have _some_ idea," L points out, miffed. "Light…she hates me, even without finding out that I've stolen her boyfriend." There's a significant amount of sarcasm on those last three words, almost as if they're in a foreign language, repeated by rote.

"If you bring her memories back, how are you going to stop her from killing me? As you point out, she _does_ have the Eyes."

"Not right now, she doesn't," Light corrects him. "But I'm almost sure that the minute she comes back in contact with a Shinigami, she will."

The enthusiasm in L's voice drops even further. "Oh yes. Another Shinigami."

"Sorry. And I'll get control of Misa before you ever come in contact with her. She's been devoted to making me love her since we met. If my complete lack of interest didn't stave her off, I don't imagine you will. Besides—if she does anything against you, she dies too."

"Which will do me a lot of good," L mutters against him sulkily.

"It might stop her from trying in the first place."

* * *

L's plan to vanish goes off without a hitch.

Several days before, L gave Light a name to go with the face of the elderly gentleman, using a page torn out of the back of the Death Note. (The otherworldly book immediately renews itself, leaving no evidence of the stray sheet.)

Ten seconds before the time written in the Death Note, L collapses while in the same room as Light, Mogi, and Chief Yagami. Light makes the appropriate fuss, crouched over his friend defensively and sending the older men scurrying.

If he didn't know better, Light would have actually thought something was wrong. L is very, very still. And suddenly it is all out of his hands. Watari arrives, a hollow look in his eyes as he bends over the little detective. Quietly, he gathers his charge into his arms and, with an 'Excuse me', leaves the room. Light catches up with his father and Mogi and tells them to cancel the ambulance.

"Is he…" Soichiro asks anxiously.

Face white, trembling, Light shakes his head in a no, as if too choked up to answer. "Watari's taken him," he manages.

They hear nothing else from the old man, of course. Light spends a lot of time for the rest of the day hunched over in a chair with his head pillowed on his arms, as if distraught.

He is actually keeping a careful eye on the time, and as the appointed second sweeps by, Light releases a hefty sigh that quickly turns into a muffled sob.

* * *

When Light sends Misa to collect the Death Note he'd buried months ago, she does indeed make the trade for the Eyes in exchange for another half of her dwindling lifespan.

"I don't remember his name!" she burbles at him as they walk through an empty park, shadowed by Ryuk, who has been placated with apples from both of them. Rem is still haunting the Death Note back at headquarters.

"What?" She interprets it as surprise. He had forgotten that he'd asked her to kill L the moment she regained her memories. In retrospect, it's a blessing she doesn't remember: she could have destroyed their alliance with the stroke of a pen.

"It's all right, Misa," he assures her. "You don't have to."

She sniffles away the last of her conjured tears. "Really? Did he already die?"

Light smirks. "Everyone else thinks he did. We set it up that way. L's working for me now, Misa."

Misa gapes, the expression a mix of awe and horror. "How did you do that?"

_Ah,_ Light thinks, and then says it for good measure. "Now, there's the part you're not going to like."

That's an understatement.

She _hates_ it. She hates it with a passion so enthusiastic and a vocabulary so comprehensive he's almost impressed.

The mood is not helped by Ryuk's chortling at this latest turn of events.

"Look, Misa," Light finally snaps, "deal with it. Otherwise we'd both most likely be dead. He would have caught us, you know." A blatant lie—Light had things under control before L threw that monkey wrench into the works.

She bites her lip and stares at him in rage, one foot still trembling from where it repeatedly stomped the ground.

"But I love you!" she wails, regaining her voice.

He resists the urge to sigh. "The minute he ceases to be useful, Misa, then we'll see. For the time—if any harm comes to him, I'll assume it was your doing! And then there will be nothing keeping me from returning that harm to you."

Misa squeaks in fear—he has never really shouted at her before—and promises to obey. She does not promise to like it.

* * *

Light presides over the destruction of the task force very cautiously. Using his free sheet, he sends Ide to investigate Misa, asking awkward questions seemingly on his own, independent of the task force.

Rem leaps into action, ending the man's life two hours before the time written on Light's sheet, and he is rid of two possible threats in a single stroke. No one sees the Shinigami's Death Note fall, and Light secretes it away quickly.

When L's system mysteriously collapses, no one is in the room, and it is a good hour and a half before anyone notices that all the data has been deleted. Privately, Light thinks it was very carefully lifted.

Over the next month, several things happen.

Light announces that he wants to rent an apartment closer to school, and his parents sigh over their son leaving home. When he favors a location with two bedrooms, they smile.

He does invite Misa to move in. She will definitely be sleeping in the other bedroom. Exclusively.

Mogi and Matsuda both fall prey to apparent random chance; one in a car crash, the other to an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

At that point, Aizawa requests permission to resign in order to be with his family and Soichiro Yagami grants it without resentment.

Despite the fact that Kira continues to practice his own form of arbitrary justice, the task force folds up completely.

Light, as a responsible young man not officially connected to the police, takes custody of the Death Note.

* * *

**December:**

On the bus back to his apartment, Light strikes a deal with Ryuk, who has decided to follow Light instead of Misa, on the grounds that Light was 'more interesting'. He does this by talking into his cell phone, pretending that there is another person on the line.

He gets off a few stops early to stop by a grocery, and leaves a bag of apples in the park in exchange for Ryuk going away and leaving him alone until tomorrow morning.

L hates Ryuk, and sulks fiercely when forced to be around the Shinigami. Light has definite things in mind for the afternoon, involving L, and they do not include cajoling L out of a sulk.

When a Shinigami-free Light finally gets back to his apartment on the last day of the semester in a very good mood, he is only partially surprised to find a fire burning in the small fireplace and Misa trying to cook.

"Hi Light!" she chirps, abandoning whatever's on the stove in favor of bouncing onto him and kissing him. He averts his face just in time and what would have landed on his mouth hits his cheek instead.

She pouts briefly, and yelps as her largest pan of three overflows. Steam billows, and the smell of burning water intensifies.

"Turn the heat down, Misa-san," L informs her from the door of the master bedroom. There's a headphone looped over one ear, wires dangling from it—a sight which Light finds quite amusing. "You're smiling," the older man observes.

"Kira supporters," Light explains briefly. "There's a real influx of support from the young adults. And, of course, last day."

"Of course." L untangles the headphones and tosses them back into the room, where he keeps his laptop, before skirting around Misa to welcome his lover back properly.

The sound of a metal spoon hitting a saucepan interrupts them, and they both look over to see Misa stirring whatever it is with a bit more vigor than necessary, a look like thunder on her face. She is very deliberately not looking at them.

Light rolls his eyes, smirked, and drags L off to the other room, closing the door firmly behind them.

"Why is she cooking?" he asks, safely out of earshot. "And…what?"

L considers this for a moment, thumb to mouth, examining the ceiling as if there were an answer written there. "I believe she has been reading more magazines."

Light groans with feeling. "Not another one of those 'enhancing femininity' ploys."

"I believe so."

"Oh well," Light shrugs, dismissing Misa completely, "let her do what she wants—as long as it doesn't interfere with us, right?"

L doesn't bother to answer, resuming the kiss the blonde girl interrupted previously with enthusiasm. Light practically purrs with delight, enjoying the kisses and caresses that put everything else out of mind for a little while.

When one of L's hands moves away for a second, he doesn't even think anything of it, distracted as he is.

He hears the sound first, oddly enough—the cough-spit of a silenced gun. And then it rips through him, agony like he's never known before splitting his mind and soul in half. Staggering backwards, Light gapes in horror, fireworks going off behind his eyes as he struggles to see through the pain.

When he does, it almost hurts more than the gunshot. The pleasure in his lover's eyes has been replaced with dead cold, unaffected by the man writhing in agony before him, indifferent to the blood that has spattered across his body. L holds the gun in the confident grip of someone who has been taught to use a weapon, and his eyes are flat with hatred.

_L…_

Light's legs collapse beneath him, and the impact sends another wave of red-hot pain through his body. Involuntarily, he cries out in agony.

He's helpless as Misa responds to a cry definitely of pain, barging into their room despite a thousand warnings to the contrary. She stops short in the door, mouth opening in the prelude to a scream, eyes wide.

Misa turns to run.

Someone has taught L to use a gun, taught him well. His expression not changing, L turns, lines up the shot, and fires, all in the time it takes Misa to get halfway around.

The bullet takes her through the right temple, and she finishes her turn in a lazy fall to the ground, propelled onward by the force of the shot. She's dead before she hits the ground.

L watches her fall, head slightly cocked in the same expression of flat curiosity he's worn so many times. Once sure of his shot, the man turns back to look at Light, who is in too much pain to rise—for all the good it will do.

"You—" Light hisses in pain and fury. He can't think, isn't sure whether to scream or shout or cry. "You _son of a bitch!_ How dare you—L, L, why?"

"Because you have killed thousands," L says, and it's _so cold_. "Because you would have killed thousands more."

"For justice, L, to put the world how it should be!" and didn't he _believe_ this, hadn't he _said_…

"Because you are _wrong_," L continues, implacably. "Because you would have killed me. Because you would have killed Watari, who, by the way, is still alive."

Through the pain, through the betrayal, Light still finds the strength to spit at the man holding the gun on him.

L isn't done. "Because you would have _continued_ to kill. And when my heirs rose against you, as they must do, you would have killed at _least_ one of them, and _I cannot let you do that._"

Light has never been this helpless in his life, and he is horribly aware that he never will be again. Even with medical attention, the chances of him surviving the shot still lodged in his intestines are low, and L isn't likely to be calling the paramedics any time soon. "One murder to save thousands, _so how are you any different from me, L!_"

"I'm sorry," L tells him, and how unfair is that? "I don't want to kill you, Light."

But he will anyway, and Light knows it. "For a while there, L," he spits, "I almost thought you loved me."

The façade falls, for just a moment, and the merciless killer is gone. "For a while, Light," he says, just for them alone, "I did."

_No,_ Light shouts among the chaos that is overwhelming his mind, _I was so close! L…_

L levels the gun again, and this shot takes him straight through the heart.

* * *

It's the last move in a long game, and although L has been in control ever since Light accepted his gambit on that roof in the rain, it hurts, worse than anything.

But he knows what he has to do. He has set it all up in advance, because Light—_Kira!—_stopped watching him as closely when he thought the young detective was under control. From the moment he fired that first shot, the clock has been ticking.

L has seen thousands of crime scenes since he began working as a detective all those years ago, and he knows how to plan the perfect murder.

He cleans the gun of fingerprints first, using a thick cloth that will not transfer fingerprints like some of the thinner fabrics will. Then he retrieves a heavy pair of gloves from where he had stashed them earlier under the bed, carefully avoiding touching the blood on the floor. Re-suspending his emotions—he should not have allowed himself to feel those last seconds—he manipulates Misa's right hand so that she is holding the gun, firing it into the wall just past where Light's—_Kira's_—body lies.

Her prints are on the gun now. To an outside observer, one that had heard the gunshots, it would appear that she fired the first shot, crippling Light. She then fired again quickly, missing—the spurious bullet in the wall. The third shot remained the same, only the shooter changed.

The fourth shot would appear to be a suicide—a shot through the temple.

A double murder, transformed into a murder-suicide.

Still very aware of that clock, L retrieves the three Death Notes—Rem's, Misa's, and Light's—from their respective hiding places. Light—Kira—trusted him, as he was meant to, and he knows all he needs to. He had even engineered the absence of the Shinigami, by turning uncooperative when Ryuk was around.

L is not sure if Shinigami can track Death Notes, but he is absolutely sure that weapons like these should not be allowed to exist. Casting them into the fireplace, which he had lit earlier that day, claiming to be cold, he prods at them with the poker until they have completely dissolved into black, noxious ash.

Time is ticking…

Moving absolutely efficiently, still wearing his gloves, L strips off his bloodstained clothes, replacing them with a fresh set. He stows the ruined garments in the same bag he got the gloves from, along with his laptop, the gun, and another set of clothes that don't look like they could be Kira's.

Pocketing his cell phone as well, L scans the room, ignoring the two bloody bodies.

He has no other possessions. At first glance, the room belongs to only one person.

L skips over Misa's body in the doorway, emerging out into the corridor with clean feet to finish what he started. In the kitchen area, Misa's abortive attempt at cooking has burnt black.

_He_ had suggested that she try to cook, in fact, but not so she could impress Light—Kira, he reminds himself. All he wanted was…the gas jets.

Gas jets, with a little nudge, would start leaking very flammable gas into the atmosphere, and, before long, it would encounter his little fireplace fire.

If there is any fine evidence left in the apartment by the time the fire department puts that one out, he'll be very surprised.

Pulling on an old hooded jacket of Light's, and wearing shoes for the look of it, L slips away from the perfect murder scene, vanishing into the city.

* * *

Several streets away, he pulls out the cell phone and dials a very particular number. He waits, still keeping a tight leash on his emotions, as it rings.

It routes him through to a menu, as it should.

"Override," L tells the computer. "Override emergency, code 311079." Only two people in the world know why that number is the emergency code. "Override."

The menu processes the unusual request, and starts ringing again in earnest.

A minute later, he hears the line open, and a very welcome voice say, "Hello?"

"Watari," L says coolly, thankful that Kira believed the false name he'd given him to write down. "It's me."

The gasp of relief is audible, even through a cell phone. "Are you alright?" his guardian asks urgently, tripping over his words in his haste.

"I need to get out. How long?"

Watari can probably hear the note in his voice that means that L is maybe two blows away from cracking completely. "I'm in Taiwan. I can be there in two hours."

"Tell me where you're landing," L orders curtly.

"Two hours," Watari reiterates, and hangs up.

L stands very, very still for a long moment, holding onto the phone like a lifeline.

* * *

Two hours and five minutes later, Watari waits anxiously at the door to the small private jet. He'd called ten minutes ago to inform L what gate the little plane was at, and had gotten only a curt, "Acknowledged," in return before the boy had hung up.

He has passed beyond worried, and is frantic out of his mind for the young detective. When L had come to see him, after the capture of the Death Note, and outlined his plan, Watari had been convinced that it wouldn't work, and that L would be killed instantly.

L had shrugged dismissively and said that he was likely to be killed soon anyway.

When he'd gotten back in contact two and a half months later to say only that he needed a gun, Watari had been torn between relief that he'd survived, and horror that the child was going to be forced to kill.

Now, he turns away from the shadowed gateway to pace. When he turns back, L is standing in the doorway, as pale as death and twice as haunted.

Watari makes an abortive rush to him before remembering that this is not, and has never been, a child you can pick up and comfort. Instead, he settles for resting one hand very gently on L's thin shoulder.

L drops the bag he's carrying on the floor carelessly. It makes a heavy thump, as of metal hitting metal. Apparently it is of no consequence, because L ignores it. Instead, he shuffles over to one of the chairs and curls into it, face buried in his knees.

"L?" Watari inquires softly.

One hand works its way loose and gestures, indicating that the plane is to leave.

Biting back his concerns, the elderly man moves forward to the cockpit to give the pilot his marching orders. Satisfied that the plane will take off as soon as humanly possible, he moves back to the main area.

L has vanished again.

Watari experiences one unbroken moment of complete and total horror, and then he hears a noise from the adjacent bathroom—the door has been left slightly ajar, and is, in fact, still swinging slightly.

It sounds an awful lot like someone trying to throw up and cry at the same time, so Watari just closes the door and lets the boy deal.

L doesn't come out until the plane has been in the air for almost forty-five minutes. He is pale to the point of sickly, his normally wild hair hangs limp and matted, and his eyes are suspiciously red. He is also shaking, as if he can't stop.

"What happened, L?"

The boy turns away, closing his eyes as if in pain, and curls up on the couch with his back to everything.

Watari curses everyone that has brought L to this point, Kira first, last, and in the middle of the list. Not even the crippling childhood nightmares that plagued L for _years_ had brought him this far down.

"L?"

No response, but Watari needs answers, so he takes steps he rarely, if ever, resorts to.

"Lawliet!"

L jerks visibly at the sound of the name, shivers increasing.

"Talk to me," Watari reiterates. "What happened? What did you do?"

When he speaks, L's voice could have been exhumed from the grave. "I made him love me," says L, without emotion. "And then I killed him."

* * *

The Kira Murders continue for a week and a half after the locally mourned murder-suicide of an up-and-coming actress and her boyfriend.

Then they stop forever.

* * *

**Author's Note:** I'd be _extremely_ interested to know if, up until that first gunshot, you believed L meant what he said… I may, quite possibly, now do the story both Kokoro-kun and LittleBrick requested—the companion story to 'Echo'. In other words, how L and Mello may have met. I'm not sharing the title yet.


	10. Practical Science

**Chapter Ten: Practical Science**

**Author's Note:** Written for a Creative Writing class. (Posted for kicks.) Wanted to write something _Death Note_…didn't think I could explain L (therefore any sentence with him in it has been added). Didn't want to write about Light (he's really no fun without L). Knew I couldn't explain the Death Note or Kira to the class. Figured I could just about get away with Matt and Mello…although did consider reverting Mello back to Mihael for the duration of this story, just so I didn't have to explain the name. Problems: a) can't think of him as "Mihael", and b) can't pronounce.

**Disclaimer:** Based on two sentences in chapter "One Hundred", altered in expansion.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

"This," Matt said firmly, but quietly, "is _so_ not a good idea."

His best friend tucked long, golden hair behind one ear and glared at him. "It is so," he retorted with all the immovable certainty of a ten-year-old. "It'll be funny." Mello shifted his glare from Matt to the offending pool pump. "If this damn thing will just _shift_—" He barely refrained from kicking it. As he was wearing light sandals, this was probably a good idea.

Matt, forced to be the practical one yet again, sighed and fetched a stick. Between the two of them, the boys managed to jam it through the handle and open the pipe that fed the school hot tub. Application of physics classes, two points. Maybe it would be useful in case their physics teacher this year decided to tell them to find ways physics can be used around the home.

Last year it had been a chemistry teacher who had assigned the class, as part of their unnaturally accelerated education, a search for fifty common household items that could be made to explode, with the microwave off limits. That had been a lot of fun, but the man had apparently been told to _never,_ _ever_ do that again.

Temper vanishing as quickly as it had come, Mello grinned and dropped his end of the stick. "Pass me the bottles," he urged his partner in crime. Accepting two from the armful Matt gathered up from the heap of bubble bath containers lying at their feet, he popped the lids open with a careless gesture and began pouring the contents into the pipe.

Between the two of them, the boys put about four and a half gallons of bubble bath solution into the hot tub's water supply. By the time the bottles were empty, their hands were slippery with suds and they both reeked of artificial flowers.

"Yuck," Matt summed it up, wrinkling his nose in disgust. "Maybe we should go play in the mud now."

"It hasn't rained for weeks," Mello pointed out with the air of someone struggling not to roll his eyes.

"So? We could get the hose. Or several hoses. We could turn the whole football field into a swamp."

The blond looked doubtful. "I like the football field."

"Oh, give it a rest," Matt brushed his objection off, trying to figure out a way to do the same to his hands without getting the smelly liquid on his clothes or scruffy red hair. He settled for scraping the worst of it off on the pipes. "It's not like the games stay on the field, anyway. I seem to remember a ball going into the kitchens."

"That wasn't _me_," Mello objected.

"Oh, come on, Mel—you forget I was _watching_. Besides, it's too darn hot for you and the rest of your crazy team to run around kicking a ball. Isn't that why we're turning the hot tub into a bath tub?"

"I just want to see what'll _happen_," the blond corrected him, hurrying to keep Matt off the topic of dirty footballs rebounding through the orphanage's kitchens just as they were serving lunch. "If it _works_, it'll be even better."

"And if it doesn't?"

"We hide under the bed for a week."

"Glad to know there's a _plan_. _That's_ a nice change."

"Shut up."

The conversation satisfactorily brought to a temporary conclusion, they returned to the task at hand. "I think we'd better put the lid back before we turn it on," Mello guessed.

"Yeah, good idea." Matt grabbed the cover from where it had been buried under empty bubble bath bottles. Wedging the stick back through the handle, they spun it shut, hands slipping along the lever. It generated even greater amounts of soapy, smelly bubbles, which floated up into the cool Saturday air before popping in little explosions of scent. Both boys glanced surreptitiously around before jumping up to slap them out of the air in a manner that did not at all suit their ten-year-old dignities.

With the momentary amusement that the bubbles had brought them reminding them why they'd come up with this idea in the first place, Matt kicked the main body of the bottles into the tangle of pipes to hide them while Mello clambered over them to flick the switch that turned on the hot tub's circulatory system. As it started up, he slid down, eager to see what would happen.

The pump rumbled to itself seismically.

"Um…" Matt began, a second before the half-closed lid blew off, spraying water in all directions.

Both boys yelled in surprise and distress as they were deluged with water, trying to cover their eyes with their hands. The soap still on their hands and spilled on the ground began to turn to suds.

"Run!" Mello shouted, spitting water, and they did, slipping and sliding in the instant, soapy mud.

Stopping at the top of the stairs leading to the back door, Matt and Mello looked guiltily at each other.

"I think we're in trouble," Matt summed it up.

Mello chewed on his bottom lip thoughtfully. "L?"

The redhead nodded. "L."

They inched the door closed quietly, tiptoed past a door…and then broke into a sprint up the indoor staircase, yelling, "_L_, _help_!"

The two boys careened up two flights of stairs, slipping and sliding on wet feet and leaving a dripping trail behind them. By the time they'd reached the closed door at the end of the hallway, they could clearly hear adult-type voices being raised downstairs.

L looked up from his computer in surprise and subdued amusement as the two boys dived under his bed. A second later, Mello's head emerged, holding a finger to its lips.

"If anyone asks," he hissed, "we're not here and it's not our fault."

There was a few minutes silence. L opened another program on his laptop, tapping into the various surveillance cameras installed around the orphanage. It didn't take him long to reach the pool and hot tub. One thin eyebrow went up, but he made no comment.

Slightly muffled, Matt asked, "Can we eat this?" Faint clanking sounds indicated that he had opened one of the candy tins L kept under the bed.

"No."

"Please?" Mello chipped in plaintively.

"No."

"One piece."

"Fine."

It was almost worth the staff's general consternation at the towering mass of bubbles in the hot tub, not to mention the repair bill that resulted from four and a half gallons of bubble bath being put into the system. The children _loved_ it, and were in and out of the water all day—until the bubbles died down, and twenty different girls realized that it was _their_ bubble bath the boys had stolen for their experiment.

Matt and Mello gathered up more chocolate, video games, books, flashlights, and batteries, and returned to hiding in L's room until he evicted them for being too loud.


	11. Broken

**Ficlet Eleven: Broken**

**Warning:** M-rated. Violence, sex, abuse. Light/L.

**Author's Observation:** So, it seems that I am secretly a filthy-minded little b-tch when: I can't sleep, and it's about three in the morning, and I have a physics test tomorrow. (Today.) _Someone_'s gotta pay. On that note, although all of that is true except the three-in-the-morning part, bits of this have been floating around my head for ages. Especially the last piece of dialogue. I _had_ to write that.

**Disclaimer:** No _Death Note_ for Le'letha! (And if this is what I would do to it if I had it, no wonder no one's given it to me.) I did get _Another Note_ for my birthday though—thanks much, Kokoro-kun!

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

Light sits up and stretches luxuriously, raking sweat-soaked hair off his face as he does it. He uses the movement to cast a glance over his shoulder from where he sits on the edge of the bed.

"I admit," he says, slowly, taunting, "they're _very_ good. I should have found them by now."

He does not expect a response. Instead, he inhales a breath of reeking, heated air and continues to speak his mind.

"If they knew you were still alive, would they come for you? I should try it and see. They're beginning to bother me."

Turning around fully, he runs gentle fingers across L's back and shoulders, skirting the scars he has left there before. Several long lines of fingernail scratches are open. They have left faint smudges of blood, joining other, older stains on the tangled sheets. He scratches his fingernails delicately against barely healed wounds, breaking them open again.

Fresh blood runs down L's pale skin. Light leans down to kiss an unmarked shoulder, and then licks it away. He does not stir.

"I don't want to kill them, L," Light breathes tenderly into his ear. Abruptly, he pushes L flat, roughly, and stares into dull, half-lidded eyes, looking for some sort of response.

There is none. L's eyes are cold, dead, empty.

"But I will," he promises. The hand not pinning the slender man to the bed strokes his cheek fondly as he thinks.

"It's such a waste, though, when I could use them better than you ever did."

The idea pleases him, so he kisses L, gently, insistently.

L kisses him back, hands left limp where they had fallen rising to twine into Light's hair. His eyes open, but there is no life in them. The response is automatic, thoughtless.

Light savors it. His touch is the only thing that will wake L from the stupor he has fallen into. He cannot say which he treasures more: the pleasure he takes from the kiss, the touches, the nights together, or from knowing that he has broken L Lawliet.

"If I have to catch them myself, Lawliet," Light purrs, his lips against L's own, "I will kill them."

Dark, hollow eyes stare straight through him as if he no longer exists.

Light whispers directly into L's ear, "Your _children_, L."

L is gone again, lost within the labyrinth he's hiding in. By now, Light doubts that he will ever return. He also believes that L hears _some_ of what he says. So he tells him what has passed that day, or that week, depending, beyond the walls of L's cage. He has kept him informed of the hunt for the little menaces L was keeping in reserve, every step forward and setback. To Light's disgust, the two have come out about even.

"What do they want, L?" he asks idly, stretching out on the bed beside the other man. Slowly, L turns away from him, curling into a ball and exposing the scars on his bare back again. Stroking L's dark, matted hair, Light thinks out loud. "If they can't be caught, then they must be killed…or bribed."

L's halting breaths are too shallow. Light has to place his head against his blood-smirched back to hear it. So he does.

"Or seduced, I suppose." L's breathing does not change. His eyes do not flicker.

"Misa wanted _power_, and to be loved. Do they want me dead? You, returned? They don't even know you're alive."

Light finds understanding, at a distance, Mello and Near as frustrating as trying to understand L, as intimately as he knows him. Suddenly furious, he digs his nails into L's bare shoulder until a new set of gashes forms.

"_Look_ at me, damn you!" Light snaps, pulling L back towards him. He kisses him fiercely, biting.

L responds to the kiss, but makes no move to lick away the blood from his torn lip.

Light wants to hurt him, badly. He wants to hold him, and be gentle. He wants L's children alive because he wants to know if they are anything like their master, and if so, _exactly_ how.

Hurting him is easier, these days, but there is no pleasure in it.

Furious, Light pulls away, shoving away a stray sheet corner and rummaging for his clothes. L lays where he has fallen, expression empty.

Light knows full well that locks can be picked, but when he is not in this room, the door is bolted from the outside. Several times. Still, he must unlock the door from this side before he can leave.

"Light."

Shocked, Light stops in the doorway, turning around halfway while struggling not to let his mouth hang open. L has not spoken a word in _months_, made no discernable sound beyond helpless whimpers and cries of the lust that seems to be the only emotion he feels.

L is _awake_, aware of his surroundings, sitting up in bed; staring at Light, but actually _seeing_ him. His eyes are rimmed with bruises, his cheeks hollow. A thin trickle of blood runs from one corner of his mouth. He is as pale as the dead, and as skinny. Ribs that Light has run his hands across a thousand times are prominent, visible.

The sheet, stained with blood and sweat and semen, falls about him like a shroud.

Light is aware that, despite his best efforts, he is gaping.

"You're _killing_ me," L points out, his voice faint and failing.

His neat, clean fingers tighten on the doorframe. Something bites at his gut.

It's not guilt. It's hate.

"Die, then, for all I care," Light tells the broken remains of his lover, and slams the door.


	12. Trees in the Garden

**Ficlet Twelve: Trees in the Garden**

**Note:** Sequel to "Liar Liar"; if you don't remember that story (it's Chapter Nine) then please reread that before reading this. **Gaawa-chan** suggested that I explore 'what happens next' further, so a tip of the hat (that I am not technically wearing) there.

**Warning:** Shonen-ai as fallout from "Liar Liar", excessive use of the present tense…and to paraphrase an excellent writer, angsty fic is angsty. L and Light happen to have the perfect destructive relationship.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

_Out of the ground the __Lord__ GOD made various trees grow that were delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…_

—the Book of Genesis, 2:9

Quillsh Wammy is worried.

The child—to Quillsh Wammy, he will _always_ be a child, despite the fact that L Lawliet is twenty-five years old and intelligent beyond the capability of tests to measure—is unresponsive, half-comatose, locked within the realms of his own mind: Watari does not want to consider what horrors the child is capable of conjuring within that mind to add to those he has already experienced, none more traumatic than today.

He has not spoken a word for an hour, since revealing to his guardian how he brought the Kira Case to an end the only way he could, and the two curt sentences are still echoing in the elder man's ears.

_"I made him love me. And then I killed him."_

Watari longs to be able to help the boy, at least extend some measure of comfort, but L has never been one to be touched and coddled; and now, more than ever, Watari is afraid to touch him, as if he might shatter at the slightest breath.

The thought—the very _thought—_of what L has done, of the lengths to which he has gone, horrifies Watari, he who thought he was _used_ to how cold L could be, how ruthless. To take your worst enemy—the one trying to _kill_ you—as your _lover_, to work at his side, and then to kill _him_: it brings bile to his throat. He cannot imagine what it will do to L.

As the private plane they are riding in begins to circle, touching down from the airport in Taiwan it departed not five hours ago, he studies L again, wondering where to begin to heal the fragile young detective.

L is lying on the couch, facing the cushions, eyes tightly closed, shutting out the world. He has curled himself into as tight a ball as possible, arms folded across his chest and hands clamped around his ears. He is shaking slightly, and not because the plane is landing.

"L," Watari calls softly, extending a hand over his ward's shoulder but not actually touching him. "L."

A few more repetitions later, L actually responds, albeit briefly. "No," he whispers, not opening his eyes, and turns his face away, into the seat cushions.

"L, what do you want to do?" he asks. "Where do you want to go?"

His only answer, at first, is a simple, repeated, "No, no, no…" which trails off into nothingness.

Watari repeats his question.

The detective's answer, when it comes, is barely audible, and for a moment Watari is convinced that he has heard wrong.

"Home," L whimpers. "I want to go home."

L, to Watari's knowledge (and he knows him better than anyone, and realizes daily how poor that knowledge really is), has only ever called one place home, and the boy has not done so since he was fourteen years old.

But Wammy cannot help but agree that Winchester, and the orphanage located there, may be the best place for L to recover from…

…what has happened these last months.

He still cannot think of it.

"And then what do you want, L?" Watari queries softly, pressing the advantage while L is still speaking. For a moment, he futilely wishes that this was a year ago, when the answer to that question would be something as simple as strawberry cake, or hot sweet tea, or the surveillance tapes from three different conference rooms from the headquarters of the FBI. Simple things.

"…and then I want to sleep."

"All right," his guardian soothes him. "You can sleep as long as you like there."

L opens his eyes now. He stares into the seat cushion, and his eyes are as empty as the cold depths of space.

"I want to sleep," he repeats quietly, "and _never_ wake up again."

**

* * *

**

When the rumor gets to him, Mello has three textbooks on his lap, one of which he is reading, and is accidentally sitting on another.

Because it's his room too, Matt is sitting on the floor playing Grand Theft Auto V. Because Mello is trying to concentrate, and can be louder than the soundtrack if required, the redhead is wearing headphones.

"Got news," Ardis announces, opening the door uninvited and sticking her head in. "What'll you trade?"

The children of Wammy's House function on a barter economy, with the main currency being information. You don't get rumors for _free_—unless it's a _really good one_.

"What are you asking?" Mello shoots back, barely looking up from his book.

"You really want to know this. I'll redeem it later."

The blond eyeballs her. He hates bargains like this—but he likes knowing what's going on.

"Fine. Tell."

"L's back," Ardis says briefly, and gets out of the way.

"He's not!" shouts Mello. Matt takes off one headphone to listen. "You're _lying_."

"I'm _not_!"

"Since _when?_"

"I dunno!" Ardis shouts back. "He's just _here!_"

Obligation be damned. Mello dumps the books onto the bed and dashes upstairs.

L's room is on the fourth floor. L's room has _always_ been on the fourth floor. One thing it has never been, when L is home, is locked.

Today it is locked, so either he has been lied to (which does not happen much anymore, as Mello tends to exact Revenge), or something is very, very wrong. The blond tugs fruitlessly at the doorknob before knocking, calling, "L? L, it's me! It's Mello! Can I come in?"

There's no answer.

"He wouldn't let me in either."

Mello releases the doorknob to turn around and glare at Near, who has materialized some way down the hall. "How long has he been back?"

One of Near's shoulders moves up and down briefly. "I don't know. He may not even be back—but Watari is downstairs talking to Roger with the door closed."

"I don't imagine you know what about." Mello is determined not to acknowledge that the younger boy might know more than he does—but that is not going to stop him from pumping Near for information.

Near tugs on his white hair thoughtfully. "There hasn't been anything written about the Kira case for a while," he observes.

"Watari's back here, and L's door is locked."

"And they haven't come looking for us," Near adds.

They look at each other for a moment.

"Something went wrong," Mello concludes.

"But L's still alive."

"It still went wrong." Mello's not exactly sure if he likes agreeing with Near, but they do seem to have come to the same conclusion.

"He could be ill," Near points out, and Mello gives this due consideration. He loves L, really, he does, but he will be among the many who admit that L does not take care of himself. That's why he has Watari, and, if the full truth were known, his heirs.

"He could be."

There is another pause. This one is ended by Mello pulling a small package out of the hem of his shirt and handing it to Near. "Get it open," he orders curtly.

Near doesn't like to be given orders, especially by Mello, but he does take some small pleasure in realizing that Mello knows that the younger boy is better at picking locks. (Mello, who knows what doublethink is and is very good it anyway, denies this completely.) He accepts the tool kit from the blond and kneels down by the door, carefully working his way around the lock.

Everyone at Wammy's house over the age of five can pick an ordinary lock like the ones installed on the students' bedroom doors. The door to L's suite is much more complicated, thanks to B's obsessive tendencies, but Near is thirteen.

When the door finally swings open, Near doesn't bother to rise. He can probably see more from the illuminated square cast onto the floor by the hallway lights anyway; L's room is pitch dark. The windows are shuttered and covered, and, worse still, all the computer screens are off and unplugged. There aren't even any LCD lights to indicate that the computers are charging.

L lives in a digital world. This is all _wrong_.

"L?" Mello calls tentatively. "Are you here?"

Silence.

"L?" Near chimes in. "Can we come in? Are you busy?"

"Of course he's not busy, you idiot," Mello hisses, kicking the boy at his feet softly. "No computers!"

"I can _see_ that."

The voice from the darkness is a growl, scarcely human. "Get out."

Mello has to fight to keep the quaver from his next words, less because the voice is scary than because it is, underneath, familiar. "L, are you okay?"

"I told you to _get out_!"

Staring into the darkness, they can't even _see_ him. "L?" and _damn_, there was that shake.

There's a doorway, further into the room; for a moment, light glances off white fingers gripping the doorframe. The knuckles are torn and bloody. "Leave me _alone_." It's a cry now, not a growl.

Mello stares at that hand, at the old blood crusting the fingers and the new injuries slowly dripping, and it hurts. For love, for love of the man who has been brother and mentor to him, he steps inside, leaving Near watching anxiously at the door.

Silently, he crosses the familiar rug in the dark, skirting the small table with the ease of memory. He cannot count how many times he has knocked this lamp over, dashing into L's room with news of some achievement or fleeing from some childish misdemeanor. The lamp is off now, its battered and dented shade dark.

Because this is _L_, he reaches out, gently touching the pale hand. Slowly, he pulls L's hand into his and draws him out into the twilight cast by the door.

Against his will, Mello hears a faint cry of horror come from his own mouth.

L is a _wreck_. His skin is sallow, having lost any shade of health it may have once had. Black hair, matted and filthy, has grown long enough to get caught between cracked and bleeding lips. And his eyes are…unspeakable.

L has often resembled a vampire, but he has never looked more dead.

"Go away," L whimpers, tugging futilely on his hand and turning his face away from the faint light, from their eyes. "Go away…"

Mello has always thought of L as pleasantly emotionless, interested but removed. He cannot imagine what has happened to bring the dispassionate sleuth so low. More out of shock than design, he refuses to let go of L's hand.

"L, what's happened?" he asks, wiping dried blood from his mentor's chin. Dimly, he realizes that he is almost taller than L now.

The detective's huge eyes close in pain. "…saved your life…" he whispers brokenly. "Lemme go; it hurts."

"Near," Mello tosses over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from L, "close the door."

Near does so, throwing the room back into darkness.

"No," L mutters invisibly. "Can't…can't be here; can't _looka'you_…done so _wrong_, Mello…"

"What happened, L?" the blond asks quietly, and, perhaps inadvisably, "Did you win?"

L slurs, "…won the game…won the battle…won the war…" and trails off into eerie sobs of laughter. "He's dead," he whispers.

"Kira?" Mello asks unwisely.

At the sound of the name, L wails as if in unbearable pain, yanks his hand loose from Mello's, and lashes out. The tips of his fingernails barely connect with the boy's cheek. They do not break the skin—the blow will not even leave a mark—but to Mello they are like streaks of fire burning into his face. Horrified, he jerks back, almost colliding with Near.

"I saved your life, Mello," L whispers into the darkness. "Now _leave me alone_…both of you!"

Aware they have pushed the limits, both boys flee.

They stop just outside the door, which latches firmly behind them.

"What the _hell_ happened to him?" Mello breathes, staring aghast at the door as if he could see through it.

Near twirls a finger in his hair, dark eyes wide with shock. "Kira," the pale boy says finally. "I think L killed him."

A second later, Near adds, "And I think he did it himself—and looked him in the eyes as he did it."

"Oh my God," Mello whispers, and his hands flicker reflexively in a cross.

**

* * *

**

There is a room on the bottom floor of Wammy's House; or, at least, there is a door. For years, the super-intelligent children that inhabit the house have struggled to open it; the finest minds of an underage generation have applied their best and brightest ideas to the problem of unlocking _that door_. Only space, or the lack of it, has prevented judicious application of a wrecking ball.

No one has yet succeeded.

The only person apparently capable of entering this room is one L Lawliet. No one exactly knows what he has done to the door to make it so impassable, but he has obviously done it very well.

Despite their best efforts, not only can the children of Wammy's House not get into the room, they have also yet to figure out exactly what he keeps inside it. The rumors are fantastic.

It has gone through several other monikers depending on who has been reading what lately. Although the membership changes, there is always a small minority who insist on calling it the Batcave, or the Fortress of Solitude, alternately. There is apparently _that age_.

But by common consent, it is generally called L's Lair.

It is perhaps the one place in the universe where L feels completely secure.

By L's perfect internal clock, it is 3:48 in the morning when he leaves his fourth-floor suite and creeps downstairs. Anyone up this late will be in their room, either studying or watching television.

Not even Quillsh Wammy knows how to get into the Lair, but L wants to be completely alone, possibly for the rest of his life. He wants to curl up inside his own head and scream in pain and guilt—and, for possibly the first time in his life, loneliness.

He wants to _die,_ damn it, and if that means locking himself in his own Lair and starving to death, then so be it.

It takes him only an instant to open the door to the Lair. Today, he does not even spare a thought to wonder how anyone can find this so hard. _He_ knows the secret; as with so many other things, he cannot understand how _anyone_ can not see what is so obvious to him.

The rumormongers would be heartbroken if they ever found out what was actually in L's Lair.

It's a very simple room. The ceiling is quite high, and the walls are soundproofed. There are no lights installed in the ceiling—L likes the dark. The floor is plain wood, and there is no furniture, only a flat pallet and a computer. A small collection of peripherals are stacked neatly next to the monitor screen.

The last time L was here, the Kira case was just beginning. When he left, it was to travel to Japan, to formally face the police during a case for the first time in his life, and to meet Light Yagami.

The computer screen glows softly as L closes the door behind him. His footsteps make no sound against the smooth wood. Sinking to the ground before the computer screen where he has solved so many cases from, he presses a torn and bitten thumb to his lips and breathes in a broken sob. Desperate to stop, he bites into the flesh of his finger until blood flows.

Licking the blood from his hands a little bit at a time, L shuffles over to the pallet and lies down to sleep, he wishes, the rest of his life away.

* * *

_L is dreaming._

_He knows that he is dreaming. It is sweeter than waking, where he cannot hide from himself. Dreaming, he, the liar, can lie, and no one need know the truth. Awake, there is no escape._

_In the dream, there is a river. He stands at the shore in the dark and watches it flow, and he knows, in the way that dreamers know, that the river is evil._

_It is not a feature of the river, the river itself is not evil. It is made of evil, the substance that flows through it, composes it, is the essence of evil itself._

_(In the dream, you cannot ask, "What is evil?" Evil is.)_

_He dips his hands (slim, white hands that have never burned in the sun or torn in strain) into the river, letting it soak into his skin. When he pulls them out, his pale skin is coated with blood._

_He watches it drip from his fingertips in strings and patterns, back into the river, and when his hands are clean and dry again, only a shadow of the darkness lingering, he plunges them in again, deeply._

_Cupping his hands beneath the liquid, he raises them. It flows over the edges of his hands, pooling in his palms._

_L stares into the little mirror. His own reflection stares back at him, haunted and wan. _

_L meets his own eyes in the mirror, and they change, from deep and shadowed black to bright golden brown._

_Deep inside him, something tears. It hurts. An illusion, maybe. A lie._

_L touches his lips to those of his lover's, in the mirror, and drinks deep._

* * *

He wakes in darkness, with his nightmare on his lips.

"I killed him," L whispers, to the dark.

"I _killed_ him. Light, I'm…"

Sorry? Is he sorry? For what he has done? Knowing _why?_

"Light, I…"

He what? What can he say, to the ghost of his lover, the ghoul of his enemy?

Light, I love you?

Did he?

Light, I want you?

Had he?

Light, I want you back?

Does he?

Light, I miss you?

Can he?

Light, I don't regret what I did?

Didn't he?

Shuddering, L brings his hands to his lips and dreams a kiss. A poison kiss, a liars' kiss, but _God_, it had felt so _good_…

Light, I hate you?

And he did, he _did_, he should, he had…but it was so hard to hate the dead.

"Light," L whispers, "what now?"

What now?

He remembers how sweet it was, the kisses, the lust; the meeting and merging of two minds so far beyond the rest of the world, that they could build their own world together, and make it perfect, and more—

He remembers the cruelty he had seen in those eyes as they kissed, and worse, the indifference as they killed—_I looked like that, when I killed him_, L knows.

L remembers the pure joy of having a partner equal, at last, to himself.

_I saved your life_, he whispers, again, to the blond boy upstairs, who loves him like a god.

_I…_

_Light wanted me dead,_ L knows. _And I _hated_ him for it._

_And here I am, dying._

L stares into the darkness, stares it down.

_Damned if I'll let him kill me, after all that!_

* * *

Light is in the dream.

"Get out," L tells him. He has said that often lately, but it seems he has been telling the wrong person.

"I thought you loved me, L," Light says remonstratively.

"I do."

"You killed me, L," his lover says, in his dream. "How could you do that?"

L shakes his head, softly, and in the dream he reaches out to touch the other man. His skin is warm and soft beneath his hand. "You know why. Just as you know that you would have killed me first, if you had thought a little more."

Light smiles, and it's an honest smile, not the sweet lie. "I would have, if you hadn't tempted me. I wanted the world—hopefully one that included you at my side."

"At your side?"

The dream shrugs. "In my bed as well. …I never should have trusted you."

"I never should have loved you."

"But you did."

"So did you." And L smiles back.

"I'm not going to let you kill me, Light—not then and not now. Now get out of my head!"

In the dream, Light smiles—that slow and evil smile that had sent chills down L's spine and heat flashing through the rest of his body. "I don't think so, love…"

L knows that he is dreaming…but the kiss is still sweet.

* * *

Quillsh Wammy hopes like hell that the boy is hiding in that Lair of his, because he seems to have vanished. He seems doomed to spend the rest of his life worrying about L.

…actually, he could live with that.

He returns to the fourth floor in the late afternoon to check if L has returned from isolation for the sixth time that day. He is pleased and surprised (and pleased to be surprised) that a few of the lights are on.

"L," he says briefly to the frail young detective curled in the armchair, sucking wanly on a lollipop. He desperately hopes that the single syllable can convey how relieved he is to see the boy.

"Hello," L replies, and smiles faintly. Watari smiles back.

"Are you all right?" his guardian asks, daring to lay one hand on that flyaway black hair, which appears to have been combed for the first time in weeks.

L's eyes drift off into the middle distance, and he murmurs, "I hit Mello."

Watari mentally runs through placating and dismissive, and settles for facetious. "Did he notice?" he inquires, which at least has the benefit of drawing L's attention back towards his handler.

"He hasn't stopped asking me when he can come and see you," Watari clarifies, enjoying being able to see that "Aha!" moment in those huge eyes.

"I didn't mean to," L explained.

"I know." Watari takes a seat on the couch across from him. "Are you hungry?"

"If that is a particularly tactless inquiry into my mental well-being…"

L is apparently doing much better…

"…then yes, I am improving."

"Good." Seeing no need to immediately press the subject, Watari rises to leave the boy in peace.

"Quillsh."

Just as Watari rarely calls his charge by his full name, L generally refrains from addressing his elder by his given name. It gets Watari's full attention.

"I won't let him beat me," says L, quietly but firmly. "I _never_ will."

There is nothing Quillsh Wammy can say in reply to that, and he does not try.

* * *

**Afterword/Disclaimer:** FIRST: I actually did not invent the Lair. It is visible (partly) in: Volume 1, pages 51, 107,163-5; Volume 2, p. 15, 22, 28; and best, Volume 7, p. 131, 148. When we see L (partially) in those pages, his posture is better and he does not have both knees up to his chest. Once L comes to Japan, we never see the Lair again. SECOND: Indirectly, Light Yagami did kill Mello in the original plotline. (I was _very_ annoyed about that, and would have shouted at the page if I wasn't in a math class at the time.) THIRD: Ardis is an OC. I like her name. I like my big yellow name book, too. FOURTH: There's a great crossover story, "Alphabet", in which Mello calls L's base of operations "the Batcave". I think Mello dropped the joke after a while. Of course, he had better things to do. FIFTH: I don't own the Book of Genesis. Really don't. SIXTH: I really, really, _really_, to the nth degree, don't own GTA5. I had to ask my brother for the name of a video game—_any_ video game! SEVENTH: really seventh? Misa is not even mentioned because I DON'T LIKE MISA. My world would be a happier place if she did not exist. That combination of cunning and gross stupidity makes me queasy. Besides, it would take the focus off the fantastically destructive L/Light relationship.

Thanks for reading all this angst! Ta.


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